Principal API Architect, API Platform Engineering & Governance Enforcement
Long term contract
NJ (Hybrid-3 days onsite)
Immediate client interview
Job description:
Principal Architect reporting to engineering leadership. Partners closely with the API Governance Lead, Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, IAM, SRE and domain engineering teams.
The Role
You are the senior technical authority for enterprise API architecture and the enforcement of API governance standards. This role exists to close the gap between governance policy and engineering execution: governance defines the rules, you make them executable through platform capabilities, CI/CD controls, contract validation, and runtime policy.
This is a hands-on architecture and engineering leadership role. Your goal is to make the compliant delivery path the default path, so federated teams can move quickly without creating contract drift, security gaps, audit exposure, or inconsistent consumer experiences.
What You''ll Do
Architecture and platform strategy
Define the enterprise API architecture model across REST, GraphQL, event-driven APIs, and service-to-service integration
Own the technical strategy for gateway architecture, service mesh integration, developer experience, lifecycle tooling, observability, and runtime enforcement
Establish supported patterns and guardrails for enterprise-scale API delivery
Governance enforcement
Translate ratified standards into machine-enforceable controls: OpenAPI/AsyncAPI/Graphql validation, schema checks, linting, contract testing, backward-compatibility validation, CI/CD quality gates, and policy-as-code
Define what "compliant" means in code, pipelines, gateway policy, and production telemetry
Own the technical rules for API classification and layering: enterprise, domain, channel, data-access, and partner APIs
Traffic and migration architecture
Define where routing, authN/authZ, rate limiting, resiliency, and audit controls belong across ingress gateways, service mesh, and application services
Lead architecture across the gateway estate, including migration-safe patterns for policy parity, consumer cutover, and decommissioning without standards drift
Developer enablement
Build and maintain reference implementations and golden paths for common API patterns
Own the technical requirements for a complete, trustworthy enterprise API catalog: ownership metadata, classification, lifecycle status, consumer dependencies, and audit traceability
Security and reliability
Own implementation patterns for OAuth2, OIDC, JWT validation, mTLS, workload identity, token propagation, rate limiting, circuit breakers, SLOs, and end-to-end traceability
Partner with Security, IAM, SRE, and Compliance to ensure controls are enforceable and audit-ready
Technical leadership
Serve as senior reviewer for cross-domain, high-blast-radius, externally exposed, and regulated API designs
Review critical pull requests, contribute production code to platform primitives, and mentor senior engineers and domain architects
Lead through technical depth and credibility, not reporting lines
Your Authority
Establish mandatory technical controls for enterprise APIs
Approve or reject cross-domain and high-risk API designs
Require remediation before release when codified, non-negotiable standards are violated
Define compliance criteria for delivery pipelines and runtime enforcement
Recommend platform roadmap priorities for governance enforcement and developer experience
What You Bring
12+ years of software engineering experience in distributed systems, API platforms, or enterprise integration
Multi-year experience as a Principal, Staff or Lead Architect
Production ownership of enterprise-scale API platforms or high-volume API ecosystems
Deep expertise in REST, GraphQL, event-driven architecture, contract-first development and API lifecycle management
Strong knowledge of OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, and enterprise identity integration
Experience building automated controls through CI/CD, policy-as-code, and deployment gates
Experience in one or more - APIC, KGateway, Datapower, IBM MQ, Kafka
Proven ability to influence engineering teams without direct reporting authority
Preferred
Banking, payments, insurance, healthcare, or other regulated environments
High-transaction-volume platforms and multi-gateway migrations or consolidations
Internal developer platforms, API catalogs, developer portals, or API product models
Audit-grade traceability and automated regulatory evidence
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