Senior API Engineer (Python / AWS)

We are looking for Senior API Engineer (Python / AWS) for our client in Fort Mill, SC.

Job Title: Senior API Engineer (Python / AWS)

Job Location: Fort Mill, SC

Job Type: Contract

Job Overview:

Pay Range: $55hr - $60hr

Requirement/Must Have:

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, API engineering, or cloud application development.
• Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master s preferred).
• Demonstrated handson experience with Python for backend and API development.
• REST API design and implementation.
• AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.
• Terraform for Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience building and operating APIs in largescale, production environments.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, and secure API design.
• Experience with CI/CD, Gitbased workflows, and automated testing.
• Ability to troubleshoot production issues and support oncall rotations when required.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain Pythonbased REST APIs that support businesscritical workflows.
• Build APIs using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway, following APIfirst and REST best practices.
• Implement clean, testable, and welldocumented Python code suitable for enterprise production environments.
• Optimize API performance, reliability, scalability, and error handling.
• Ensure proper API versioning, contract stability, and backward compatibility.
• Implement secure authentication and authorization mechanisms such as OAuth2, JWT, and IAMbased access.
• Enforce API security controls including request validation, throttling, rate limiting, and auditing.
• Partner with security teams to ensure APIs meet enterprise security and compliance standards.
• Provision and manage AWS infrastructure using Terraform.
• Create and maintain reusable Terraform modules for API Gateway, Lambda, IAM roles and policies, and CloudWatch logging and monitoring.
• Ensure environment consistency across DEV, QA, UAT, and PROD.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines for build, test, and deployment of Python APIs.
• Support automated testing, packaging, versioning, and release management.
• Implement observability through logging, metrics, alerts, and tracing.
• Participate in troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and production support activities.
• Collaborate closely with application teams, platform engineering, cloud, and security teams.
• Align API design and implementation with enterprise architectural standards.
• Actively contribute to code reviews, design discussions, and technical documentation.
• Promote best practices and a culture of engineering excellence.
• Influence API engineering standards, patterns, and best practices across the organization.
• Contribute to architectural reviews and modernization efforts.
• Help drive consistent, scalable, and maintainable cloudnative API solutions.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with OAuth providers and identity platforms.
• Familiarity with AWS SAM or Serverless Framework (tooling experience).
• Exposure to eventdriven architectures (EventBridge, SNS/SQS).
• Experience operating APIs in regulated or enterprise environments.
• Knowledge of observability tools such as CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Datadog, OpenTelemetry.
• Experience designing reusable API frameworks or shared libraries.

Skills:

• API Design Mindset builds clean, consistent, and consumerfriendly APIs.
• Builder Mindset emphasizes automation, reuse, and simplicity.
• Systems Thinking understands how APIs integrate with distributed systems.
• Collaboration works effectively across engineering, security, and platform teams.
• Ownership & Accountability takes responsibility for design, delivery, and reliability.