API Design Lead

API Design Lead

Immediate need for a talented API Design Lead. This is a 12+ Months Contract opportunity with long-term potential and is located in Houston, Jersey City, Raleigh (Remote).

Job ID:26-15461 Pay Range: $90 - $96/hour. Employee benefits include, but are not limited to, health insurance (medical, dental, vision), 401(k) plan, and paid sick leave (depending on work location).

Key Responsibilities:

• Integration Strategy and Architecture:
• Develop and lead the integration delivery for the Acquisition Platform, ensuring alignment with business objectives and technology standards.
• Lead the implementation of scalable and maintainable APIs as products
• Deliver according to architectural blueprints, integration patterns, and best practices to guide development teams.
• Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement:
• Collaborate with the Product Team, Product Architect and Platform Engineering Lead to understand integration requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Engage with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment of integration solutions with overall platform goals and enterprise standards.
• Implementation and Development Support:
• Guide and support implementation teams during the development and deployment of integration solutions.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to development teams, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
• AI Assisted Development and Agentic Integration
• Leverage AI assisted development techniques (e.g., prompt engineering, structured prompting, and human in the loop workflows) to accelerate API, integration, and orchestration development.
• Co develop integration solutions alongside AI tools to improve design quality, documentation, test coverage, and delivery speed.
• Explore and introduce agent based patterns (e.g., tool calling agents, workflow agents, or MCP style orchestration) where appropriate to automate integration tasks, environment interactions, or operational workflows.
• Identify opportunities where AI enabled automation can reduce manual effort, improve resiliency, or simplify complex cross system interactions.
• External Orientation- Stay current with industry trends and innovations to continuously improve the integration landscape.
• For third party integrations, help select the optimal integration pattern and provide rationale, proving through Proof of Concepts or Proof of Value engagements where possible
• Compliance and Security:
• Ensure integration solutions adhere to enterprise architecture standards, security protocols, and industry regulations.
• Conduct security assessments and audits to identify and mitigate risks.
• Collaborate with security teams to influence maturity of standards and policies where unique needs of the Acquisition Platform are concerned.
• Leadership and Talent Development:
• Work with the IT leadership team to embrace contemporary ways of working, attract and develop talent across the firm, and leverage economies of scale and shared capabilities.
• Promote a culture of collaboration, innovation, and excellence within the integration and development teams.
• Identify and address skill gaps, providing training and development opportunities to team members.

Key Requirements and Technology Experience:

• Skills- API & Microservices Architecture
• Enterprise Integration & API Management
• Cloud & AWS API Ecosystem
• Technical Leadership & Enterprise Delivery
• API Security + AI-Assisted Development
• API Strategy – vision and plan to extract value from API economy
• API and Microservice design principles – API as a Product, Contract First, Bounded Context, High Cohesion, Low Coupling, CQRS, Event Driven Design
• API Security – OAuth 2.0, OIDC
• API rate limiting, throttling
• AI assisted design techniques - prompt engineering and iterative co design with large language models
• Responsible AI use - including consideration of security, data exposure, and operational risk
• API performance and reliability – memory leak detection, high volume low latency response, fault tolerant design (i.e. circuit breaker pattern)
• API observability – distributed tracing, APM telemetry instrumentation
• Growth oriented mindset – ability to think beyond constraints of today and identify what is required to build the future
• Excellent communication skills – ability to translate needs and issues between tech and product/business teams
• Required Experience
• 7+ years development experience
• Experience guiding developers and designers
• Strong API and cloud background
• API Management experience with external partners
• Experienced in applying Agile methodologies
• Enterprise-scale delivery with both onshore and offshore cross functional teams
• Experience in financial services, insurance or retirement services industry
• AWS Deployment Experience – AWS API Gateway, X-ray, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, ECS, EKS, Lambdas, Event Bridge

Our client is a leading Insurance Industry and we are currently interviewing to fill this and other similar contract positions. If you are interested in this position, please apply online for immediate consideration.