API Director

Role: API Director
Location: Phoenix, AZ - Hybrid

Job Summary:

We are seeking an experienced API Director to lead enterprise API strategy, architecture, platform engineering, and modernization initiatives. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in REST APIs, microservices, AWS Cloud, API platforms, and scalable distributed systems, with strong experience leading architecture and engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the enterprise API strategy, governance, standards, and modernization roadmap.
• Lead architecture and development of RESTful APIs, microservices, and cloud-native platforms.
• Design highly scalable, secure, resilient, and reusable API ecosystems using AWS services.
• Lead Platform Engineering initiatives covering API platforms, developer platforms, CI/CD, automation, and infrastructure.
• Establish API lifecycle management, versioning, security, documentation, monitoring, and governance standards.
• Drive migration from legacy applications and monoliths to microservices and cloud-native architectures.
• Partner with product, engineering, security, DevOps, and business teams to deliver enterprise solutions.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to architects, engineers, and development teams.
• Drive reliability, observability, performance, scalability, and operational excellence across API platforms.

Required Skills

• 15+ years of software engineering and architecture experience with significant leadership experience.
• Strong expertise in REST APIs, API architecture, Microservices, and distributed systems.
• Extensive AWS Cloud experience and cloud-native architecture.
• Strong Platform Engineering, DevOps, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and automation experience.
• Experience with API Gateway, OAuth2, JWT, OpenAPI/Swagger, API security, and API lifecycle management.
• Strong knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud automation.
• Experience with observability tools such as Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, or CloudWatch.
• Strong understanding of enterprise integration, scalability, resiliency, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, architecture governance, and team leadership skills.