Node.js and API Lead

Key Responsibilities:

1. Lead Node.js API Development:
• Design, implement, and optimize scalable RESTful APIs using Node.jsand Express.js (or similar frameworks).
• Architect API systems for maximum scalability, resilience, and performance.
• Ensure that APIs are modular, reusable, and easy to maintain.
• Integrate with third-party services, databases, and other internal systems.
2. Resilience Engineering:
• Apply principles of resilience engineering to design APIs that gracefully handle failures and continue to perform under stress.
• Implement retry logic, circuit breakers, and rate-limiting to ensure the APIs can withstand transient failures.
• Use techniques such as load balancing, failover mechanisms, and distributed architectures to improve fault tolerance.
3. Monitoring & Observability:
• Set up and maintain real-time monitoring and alerting using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog, or New Relic.
• Ensure comprehensive logging, tracing, and metrics collection (e.g., through OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or Zipkin) to provide visibility into system health.
• Proactively identify bottlenecks or performance issues and implement optimizations.
• Collaborate with the DevOps team to ensure system health and visibility across all environments.
4. API Security:
• Implement security best practices for API development (e.g., OAuth2, JWT tokens, rate limiting, IP listing, and API gateways).
• Regularly perform code reviews and audits to ensure security vulnerabilities are mitigated.
5. Team Leadership & Collaboration:
• Lead and mentor a team of Node.js developers, providing technical guidance, code reviews, and career development.
• Drive adoption of best practices in API development, monitoring, and resilience across the team.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including front-end developers, DevOps, and QA to deliver high-quality software.
• Participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and retrospectives to ensure the team is aligned and focused on the right goals.
6. Continuous Improvement:
• Evaluate and recommend new technologies, tools, and frameworks that can improve development efficiency, monitoring capabilities, or resilience.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement within the development team.
• Ensure the team adopts DevOps practices and that software is fully automated for CI/CD pipelines.

Skills & Qualifications:

• Essential:
• 5+ years of experience in Node.jsdevelopment, with at least 2+ years of experience in a leadership role.
• Strong expertise in designing and building RESTful APIs using Node.js.
• Experience in building highly available, fault-tolerant systemsthat can handle production-level traffic.
• Proficiency in monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Datadog, New Relic).
• Experience with resilience patternssuch as circuit breakers, retry logic, and rate limiting.
• Deep understanding of API securitybest practices (OAuth2, JWT, API Gateways, etc.).
• Experience with cloud platforms(AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure) and serverless architectures.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and tools (Jenkins, GitLab, CircleCI, etc.).
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex distributed systems.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.
• Desirable:
• Experience with containerization and orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with microservices architecture and event-driven systems.
• Experience working with NoSQL and relational databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.).
• Knowledge of automated testing and frameworks for Node.js (Mocha, Chai, Jest).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Knowledge of distributed tracing and service meshes (e.g., Istio, Linkerd).