Senior API Architect

About the Company

We are a globally oriented organization dedicated to developing scalable, secure, and high-performance digital platforms across a variety of markets. Our teams span multiple disciplines including Architecture, Software Engineering, Product, Data, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Integration, and Infrastructure, all collaborating to build dependable digital services integration connecting applications, partners, customers, and operational systems.

Role Overview

The Senior API Architect will be responsible for leading the strategy, design, governance, and lifecycle management of APIs across enterprise applications and digital ecosystems. This role focuses on establishing scalable API standards and guiding teams to create high-quality API services that ensure security, discoverability, reusability, observability, and performance while aligning with business goals and technological initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy enterprise-wide API architectural strategies aligned with business and technology goals.
• Define API architecture principles, standards, reference models, and best practices.
• Create a comprehensive API strategy addressing internal, external, partner, and public APIs.
• Plan API roadmaps aligned to application modernization, digital transformation, and integration priorities.
• Design scalable, secure, resilient, and high-performance APIs for enterprise applications and platforms.
• Set API boundaries, service contracts, resource definitions, data structures, and interaction models.
• Establish standards for RESTful, event-driven, asynchronous, and other relevant API architectures.
• Define detailed API design guidelines including naming conventions, versioning, pagination, filtering, errors, status codes, and response formats.
• Maintain consistent and clear API documentation standards ensuring discoverability.
• Develop reusable API patterns, templates, reference implementations, and design assets.
• Lead architecture reviews and guide engineering and integration teams on API-related technical decisions.
• Conduct reviews of API specifications, designs, integration approaches, and implementation plans.
• Implement API governance processes including design reviews and approval workflows.
• Maintain records of architecture decisions highlighting design trade-offs, dependencies, and risks.
• Define standards covering the full API lifecycle from requirements, development, publication, maintenance, versioning to deprecation and retirement.
• Develop API versioning and backward compatibility policies alongside deprecation and migration strategies.
• Design API gateway and management infrastructure focusing on routing, authentication, authorization, throttling, transformation, monitoring, and policy enforcement.
• Partner with Cloud and Infrastructure teams to create scalable API management and integration platforms.
• Define robust API security frameworks encompassing authentication methods such as OAuth, OpenID Connect, token management, encryption, and comprehensive access controls.
• Collaborate with Cybersecurity to identify and mitigate API security risks, threats, and vulnerabilities.
• Set standards for input validation, rate limiting, threat management, abuse prevention, and secure API exposure practices.
• Ensure all APIs comply with security, privacy, regulatory, and data protection standards.
• Develop access control models for various consumer groups including internal teams, customers, partners, and third parties.
• Architect API integration patterns linking enterprise software, databases, SaaS, external services, and legacy systems employing synchronous, asynchronous, messaging, event streaming, and webhook designs.
• Work closely with application architects, software engineers, product managers, and business analysts to translate business needs into reusable API services and promote API-first development methodologies.
• Create strategies for API productization, discoverability, developer portals, catalogs, and service registries to improve developer experience and API adoption.
• Introduce API observability practices such as logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, and other operational monitoring parameters.
• Define performance, availability, scalability, reliability, and capacity standards and monitor API health indicators like latency, throughput, error rate and traffic patterns.
• Design resilience features including retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, caching, failovers, and graceful degradation methods.
• Lead API reliability and disaster recovery planning for critical digital services.
• Support and coordinate load, performance, security, and resilience testing efforts.
• Investigate API incidents and failures to undertake root cause analysis and implement remediation plans.
• Develop modernization plans for legacy APIs including consolidation, standardization, and reduction of technical debt.
• Evaluate API management products, integration platforms, gateways, developer tools, and vendor solutions against enterprise standards to support procurement and technology decisions.
• Manage API platform costs and capacity planning, monitoring infrastructure needs and licensing expenses.
• Collaborate with Data teams to address API data models, contracts, data quality, and access requirements.

Key Performance Metrics

• Compliance with API architecture, design, governance, and security standards
• Completion and quality of API design reviews and documentation
• API availability, uptime, latency, throughput, and error rates
• API reuse, scalability, reliability, and modernization progress
• Incident frequency and resolution time metrics
• API consumer adoption, satisfaction, and developer onboarding time
• Technical debt and duplicate API reduction
• Cost efficiency and infrastructure utilization

Ideal Candidate Profile

• Extensive experience designing enterprise-scale API and integration architectures.
• Strong expertise in API design principles including REST, HTTP, JSON, and service-oriented architectures.
• Knowledge of event-driven, asynchronous, messaging, webhook, and distributed integration design patterns.
• Hands-on experience with API gateways, management platforms, developer portals, and service registries.
• Proven capability to develop API standards, governance models, reference architectures, and detailed guidelines.
• Thorough understanding of API lifecycle management, versioning, backward compatibility, and retirement strategies.
• Experience securing APIs using OAuth, OpenID Connect, tokens, encryption, authentication, and authorization protocols.
• Adept at identifying API security threats and implementing mitigation such as rate limiting, input validation, and abuse prevention.
• Familiarity with API observability techniques including logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring, and operational support.