Lead AI/API Engineer

The Lead API Software Engineer is the senior hands-on engineering lead for enterprise API delivery. The role turns business capabilities and source-system data into secure, reliable, reusable API products. It owns technical direction at the team level while remaining accountable for implementation quality, code review, automated testing, release readiness, observability, production support, and durable correction of recurring defects.

This person will work across application teams, architecture, security, DevOps, quality engineering, SRE, data, and product partners. The role will help move the organization toward contract-first APIs, consistent Azure APIM governance, reusable domain and capability APIs, automated delivery controls, and APIs that can be safely consumed by applications, partners, automation, and AI agents.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

• Personally design, build, test, deploy, and support production APIs and supporting services using C#/.NET and Azure technologies.
• Lead technical decomposition from business capability through API contract, data mapping, integration design, implementation, test strategy, deployment, and support.
• Establish and enforce contractfirst API practices using OpenAPI or equivalent specifications; define request and response schemas, required and optional fields, data types, cardinality, status and error codes, versioning, and compatibility expectations.
• Design and govern Azure API Management implementations, including policies, products, subscriptions, routing, authentication, throttling, transformation, caching, and environment promotion.
• Conduct code and design reviews; identify security, privacy, reliability, maintainability, performance, and backwardcompatibility risks before release.
• Build automated quality into CI/CD, including unit, integration, contract, security, performance, and regression testing as appropriate.
• Implement observability using structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, dashboards, alerting, correlation identifiers, and actionable operational runbooks.
• Own or lead diagnosis of complex production issues; convert incident learning into permanent code, test, monitoring, or process improvements.
• Partner with architecture and security on OAuth/OIDC, managed identity, secrets, encryption, network controls, PHI/PII handling, and approved design standards.
• Create reusable engineering standards, reference implementations, templates, and documentation that can be adopted across API teams.
• Mentor engineers and provide daytoday technical leadership without becoming a people manager or a delivery coordinator.
• Evaluate and implement practical AIassisted or agentic engineering capabilities, including governed tool access through MCP or equivalent patterns, when justified by a concrete use case.

QUALIFICATIONS

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 5 years of handson API or integration engineering and recent technicallead responsibility.
• Deep handson proficiency in C# and modern .NET, including production services, dependency injection, asynchronous programming, testing, configuration, and secure coding.
• Demonstrated ownership of enterprise REST APIs from design through production operation; experience with microservices and eventdriven integration where appropriate.
• Strong Azure API Management experience, including policy design, security, products and subscriptions, versioning, deployment, and troubleshooting.
• Contractfirst API design using OpenAPI/Swagger and disciplined schema, compatibility, errorhandling, and versionmanagement practices.
• Experience designing and implementing OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, managed identity, certificates, secrets, role and scope models, and secure servicetoservice communication.
• Handson CI/CD experience using Azure DevOps or GitHub, with automated testing, pullrequest controls, quality gates, infrastructure or configuration automation, and environment promotion.
• Production observability and support experience using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, or comparable platforms.
• Ability to lead design and code reviews, mentor engineers, make practical technical tradeoffs, and communicate clearly with technical and nontechnical partners.