Staff Engineer – API Platforms
About the Role
We’re looking for an experienced and forward-thinking Staff Engineer (APIs) to shape the future of our integration and connectivity ecosystem. You’ll lead the evolution of our API strategy, standards, and platform enablement—helping teams design, deliver, and scale modern, secure, and maintainable APIs.
This role is ideal for someone who enjoys defining patterns that others build upon. You’ll provide hands-on technical leadership, guide architectural decisions, and drive the adoption of best practices in API lifecycle management, governance, and developer experience. Working across product, platform, and architecture teams, you’ll ensure that APIs form a reliable and reusable foundation for the organisation’s digital platforms.
What You’ll Do
Technical Strategy & Leadership
* Define and evolve the organisation’s API vision, including standards for design, documentation, versioning, security, and lifecycle management.
* Establish reusable API design patterns and promote consistency across distributed teams.
* Drive adoption of API gateways, management tools, and developer portals (e.g., Apigee, Kong, Azure API Management).
* Ensure APIs meet strong standards for authentication, observability, and scalability.
* Contribute to the long-term roadmap for API enablement, developer tooling, and discoverability.
* Mentor engineers, championing API craftsmanship, maintainability, and performance across teams.
Design & Delivery
* Design and build scalable, testable APIs using modern frameworks such as Java/Spring Boot.
* Provide technical direction on integration solutions across products, services, and platforms.
* Develop reusable assets such as SDKs, templates, shared schemas, and libraries to accelerate delivery.
* Implement strong error handling, logging, and monitoring patterns for API reliability.
* Lead improvements in automation, documentation, contract validation, and CI/CD integration.
* Reduce technical debt and improve API platform resilience through proactive refactoring and optimization.
Collaboration & Enablement
* Partner with architects, platform engineers, and product teams to align APIs with business goals and technical strategy.
* Act as a subject matter expert, supporting design reviews, architecture forums, and internal training initiatives.
* Contribute to communities of practice and cross-team initiatives to advance API engineering maturity.
* Facilitate knowledge sharing and standardization of integration patterns across engineering groups.
Technical Expertise
* Extensive experience designing and delivering RESTful APIs using Java and Spring Boot in production environments.
* Strong understanding of API design principles, including resource modeling, pagination, and error handling.
* Deep knowledge of API versioning, backward compatibility, and lifecycle management.
* Familiarity with OpenAPI/Swagger and modern documentation tooling.
* Strong grasp of API security practices, including OAuth2, JWT, scopes, and rate limiting.
* Solid experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, and infrastructure-as-code approaches.
* Deep testing experience, including unit, integration, contract, and E2E testing.
* Experience with API management and gateway platforms (e.g., Apigee, Azure API Management, Kong, or Tyk).
* Familiarity with asynchronous integration (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and event-driven architectures.
* Knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
* Exposure to modern alternatives such as GraphQL is a plus.
How You Work
* Strategic Perspective: Balances hands-on delivery with long-term platform scalability and maintainability.
* Technical Leadership: Guides teams through architectural design, technical trade-offs, and modern engineering practices.
* Collaborative: Partners effectively across disciplines to unify API design and governance approaches.
* Clear Communicator: Explains complex concepts simply and builds alignment across technical and business audiences.
* Accountable: Takes ownership of engineering quality, platform performance, and reliability outcomes.
* Continuous Improver: Actively identifies opportunities to simplify, automate, or enhance the developer experience.
* Security-Minded: Designs and promotes APIs that are secure, observable, and resilient by default.
* Mentor & Multiplier: Elevates others by sharing knowledge and cultivating best practices across teams.
Why This Role Matters
APIs are at the core of how digital products and platforms connect, scale, and evolve. As a Staff Engineer, you’ll define the patterns and practices that shape how teams across the organisation build and integrate software. Your work will ensure that the API platform is consistent, discoverable, and built for the future—empowering developers and enabling innovation at scale.