Head of Microservices & API Engineering

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Regular or Temporary:
Regular

Language Fluency: English (Required)

Work Shift:
1st shift (United States of America)

Please review the following job description:

We are seeking a Head of Microservices & API Engineering to define and lead the enterprise strategy, architecture, delivery, and operational excellence of the service and API platform that underpins our digital ecosystem. This is a mission-critical executive leadership role that will shape the way our engineering organization builds, scales, secures, and evolves software across domains, geographies, and customer channels.

This role is foundational to achieving engineering velocity, architectural integrity, and long-term technical resilience across the enterprise. As we shift toward a composable, event-driven, and cloud-native operating model, microservices and APIs represent our primary levers for decoupling complexity, enabling self-service, enforcing secure-by-design principles, and unlocking platform innovation. The Head of Microservices & API Engineering will own the vision and implementation of the API platform as an internal product-complete with developer tooling, operational instrumentation, governance workflows, and discovery models.

This is not just a platform engineering role-it's a strategic leadership position with enterprise-wide influence. The successful candidate will collaborate across infrastructure, security, business application teams, and executive stakeholders to ensure that services are scalable, reusable, observable, policy-compliant, and aligned to business capabilities. They will champion a product-driven, contract-first approach to service development, empowering engineering teams to build loosely coupled systems that evolve independently, operate reliably, and are optimized for change.

Equally important is the cultural transformation this role must drive. The incumbent will be responsible for creating a culture of API craftsmanship, documentation excellence, service ownership, and engineering rigor, while supporting onboarding, enablement, and developer productivity through standardized tooling and golden paths.

This leader will bring deep hands-on technical expertise, a modern engineering mindset, and a proven ability to scale complex platforms inside large, federated technology organizations. They will act as both an architectural authority and a builder of teams, platforms, and experiences that accelerate delivery, reduce complexity, and unlock developer creativity across the enterprise.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Following is a summary of the essential functions for this job. Other duties may be performed, both major and minor, which are not mentioned below. Specific activities may change from time to time.

Strategic & Architectural Leadership

Define and execute the enterprise-wide microservices and API strategy aligned with business product teams, application modernization, and digital transformation goals.

Architect the internal API platform as a product-supporting discovery, standardization, policy enforcement, telemetry, security, and high availability.

Establish canonical patterns for service decomposition, bounded context modeling, service contracts, backward compatibility, and versioning governance.
Platform Engineering & Operations

Lead the engineering and operation of the enterprise service platform-including API gateways, developer portals, service catalogs, and self-service onboarding

Implement and manage tools and frameworks such as Kong, Apigee, Istio, Envoy, OpenAPI/Swagger, GraphQL, Postman, and Backstage.

Design and enforce security standards, including mTLS, OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, token lifecycle management, rate limiting, quota management, and threat protection.

Build service governance guardrails (policy-as-code, dependency management, API contracts) and integrate into CI/CD pipelines and release processes.
Developer Experience & Enablement

Create and maintain golden paths and reusable scaffolding/templates for building and operating microservices.

Deliver centralized API documentation, changelog automation, sandbox environments, and quality gates for internal and external developers.

Embed observability-by-default: tracing, metrics, structured logging, and distributed context propagation usingOpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana.

Drive adoption of platform capabilities through education, engagement, roadshows, enablement tooling, and feedback loops.
Organizational Leadership

Hire, lead, and mentor a multidisciplinary team of engineers, architects, SREs, and product managers.

Foster a culture of engineering rigor, API craftsmanship, customer obsession, and delivery velocity.

Partner closely with application, security, and business leaders to scale service adoption and align APIs to customer-facing and internal business value.

QUALIFICATIONS
Required Qualifications:
The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

1. Equivalent combination of advanced education and related experience, which could include any combination of: Fifteen years' experience managing software engineers and systems analysts, Ten years' relevant business experience (i.e. making technical-related decisions on the business side), Five years' managing a large staff, (including managing managers), and Five years' experience with budget responsibilities
2. Ability to translate enterprise level strategic planning information into software and data management needs, create business plans, and turn them into effective business solutions
3. Executive level communications skills, including, strong negotiation/facilitation/presentation skills and experience negotiating with vendors for relevant products and services
4. Significant knowledge of current and emerging application software products and tools
5. Extensive project management experience to include multi-million dollar projects completed on time, within budget and delivering quality results
6. Strong analytical and architectural skills
7. Ability to manage a high volume of internal client relationships
8. Knowledge of all phases of software engineering life cycle and experience with process improvement models

Preferred Qualifications:

12+ years of progressive experience in software/platform engineering, with 5+ years in a senior leadership capacity delivering microservices or API platforms at scale.

Deep expertise in:

API Management Platforms: Apigee, Kong, WSO2, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management

Service Mesh Technologies: Istio, Envoy, Linkerd

Specification & Tooling: OpenAPI/Swagger, GraphQL, Postman, Backstage, AsyncAPI

Security: OAuth2, OIDC, mTLS, JWT, API key management, WAF, threat modeling

Observability: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger

Languages & Frameworks: Java, Go, Node.js, Spring Boot, gRPC, REST/JSON, protobuf

Strong understanding of domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, eventual consistency, and distributed systems principles.

Proven experience building secure, resilient, multi-tenant platforms with high adoption across federated engineering teams.

Experience driving service governance, documentation standards, lifecycle automation, and dependency hygiene across complex organizations.

OTHER JOB REQUIREMENTS / WORKING CONDITIONS

Visual / Audio / Speaking

Able to access and interpret client information received from the computer and able to hear and speak with individuals in person and on the phone.

Manual Dexterity / Keyboarding

Able to work standard office equipment, including PC keyboard and mouse, copy/fax machines, and printers.

Availability

Able to work all hours scheduled, including overtime as directed by manager/supervisor and required by business need.

Travel

Up to 75%

General Description of Available Benefits for Eligible Employees of Truist Financial Corporation: All regular teammates (not temporary or contingent workers) working 20 hours or more per week are eligible for benefits, though eligibility for specific benefits may be determined by the division of Truist offering the position. Truist offers medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability, accidental death and dismemberment, tax-preferred savings accounts, and a 401k plan to teammates. Teammates also receive no less than 10 days of vacation (prorated based on date of hire and by full-time or part-time status) during their first year of employment, along with 10 sick days (also prorated), and paid holidays. For more details on Truist's generous benefit plans, please visit our Benefits site. Depending on the position and division, this job may also be eligible for Truist's defined benefit pension plan, restricted stock units, and/or a deferred compensation plan. As you advance through the hiring process, you will also learn more about the specific benefits available for any non-temporary position for which you apply, based on full-time or part-time status, position, and division of work.

Truist is an Equal Opportunity Employer that does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, color, religion, citizenship or national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, veteran status, or other classification protected by law. Truist is a Drug Free Workplace.

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