Job Description
Role: API Platform Architect
Location: London (2-3days/week On-Site)
Job Type: Contract
We are seeking an experienced and highly technical API Platform Architect to lead the architecture, engineering, and continuous evolution of our enterprise API Platform. This role is fully hands-on, combining deep expertise in Azure cloud services, Kubernetes, Terraform, API security, and distributed systems with the ability to guide, review, and contribute to .NET Core API development practices. The architect will define and maintain the vision and standards for the platform while actively engaging in coding, troubleshooting, design reviews, and production support.
Key Responsibilities & Requirements
1. Architecture Leadership & Platform Ownership
* Own the architecture, design, standards, patterns, and roadmap of the enterprise API Platform across Azure, AKS, APIM, networking, security, observability, and DevOps layers.
* Translate business, security, and domain requirements into scalable, secure, highly available platform architectures.
* Provide authoritative architectural guidance while remaining hands-on with implementation, debugging, optimisation, and reviews.
* Define and govern API standards, APIOps pipelines, lifecycle processes, platform SLAs/SLOs, and security enforcement.
2. Azure Cloud Expertise
* Extensive expert-level, hands-on experience with Azure services, including:
* AKS, APIM, Application Gateway, Front Door, Load Balancers, Event Hub, Azure SQL, Storage Account, ACR, Key Vault, VNets, Private Endpoints, Application Insights, Azure Monitor, Notification Hub, DNS, VMSS, App Configuration, and more.
* Architect multi-region active-active, blue/green, and zero-downtime deployments.
* Deep understanding of Azure networking, identity, private connectivity, and cost optimisation.
3. Terraform & Infrastructure-as-Code
* Design, implement, and govern complex Terraform modules for Azure and Kubernetes using providers such as azurerm, azapi, kubernetes, helm.
* Ensure Terraform best practices, module versioning, automated validations, state management, and environment consistency.
* Drive platform provisioning automation and self-service capabilities.
4. Kubernetes (AKS) Architecture & Operations
* Expert-level knowledge and hands-on experience with:
* AKS cluster architecture, node pools, workload identity, pod security, network policies
* Helm chart authoring, deployment strategies, custom charts, container registries
* Ingress controllers, API gateways, service mesh, and traffic policy enforcement
* Observability (Prometheus, Grafana), log pipelines, distributed tracing
* High availability, cluster upgrades, autoscaling strategy, performance tuning
* Lead advanced troubleshooting (pods, networking, DNS, controllers, storage, ingress).
5. Azure API Management (APIM) & API Security
* Deep hands-on expertise in APIM features including advanced policy writing, transformations, caching, throttling, JWT validation, OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, IP filtering, client certificate handling.
* Design the end-to-end API lifecycle, including APIOps automation, environment promotion, deployment versioning, api backend health check frameworks, and rollback strategies.
* Implement API analytics, distributed tracing, alerts, performance tuning, and troubleshooting.
6. Reliability Engineering & Platform Operations
* Lead root-cause analysis, high-severity incident resolution, and resilience improvements.
* Ensure uptime, performance, and reliability of APIs deployed in AKS and exposed via APIM.
* Define SLOs, latency budgets, retry strategies, and resilience patterns (circuit breaker, timeout patterns, queue-based ingestion).
* Implement auto-remediation, self-healing patterns, and fault-tolerant architecture.
7. DevOps & Automation
* Drive GitOps-driven Kubernetes deployments using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, ArgoCD/Flux.
* Own APIOps pipeline definition for APIM deployments, testing, API versioning, and documentation automation.
* Establish CI/CD pipelines for Terraform, .NET API builds, image scanning, SAST/DAST, compliance enforcement.
8. Hands-On .NET Core API Integration & Code Reviews
* Review .NET Core API implementations to ensure correct API design, platform alignment, and cloud-native best practices.
* Provide architectural guidance for .NET API integrations with APIM, AKS, event-driven components, caching, and security layers.
* Analyse and optimise API performance, scalability, dependency injection usage, resiliency patterns, and distributed system design.
* Work with backend teams to ensure APIs are structured for observability, traceability, platform compatibility, and API governance.
* Occasionally step into the codebase to triage issues, debug complex integration problems, and provide code-level recommendations.
9. Leadership, Collaboration & Mentoring
* Lead platform engineering discussions, architectural reviews, and technical deep dives.
* Mentor engineers in cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, Terraform, API design, DevOps, and .NET integration patterns.
* Influence stakeholders across engineering, security, product, and operational teams.
* Take full ownership of delivery outcomes with a high sense of urgency and quality.
Qualifications
* Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field with 12+ years of industry experience
* Strongly preferred: Azure certifications (AZ-305/400), Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD/CKS), Terraform certifications.
* 7+ years in cloud engineering/architecture roles, including platform ownership and hands-on development/troubleshooting.