API Lead

 Job Description

Role Overview:

• Accountability: Deliver effective solution designs within the Open Banking COE, leading on API design and API security.
• API Solutions: Design end-to-end API solutions to meet business needs within a broader solution implementation.
• Solution Planning: Contribute to overall solution planning, including estimation, and identify technical risks, issues, and assumptions.
• Best Practices: Define and adopt best practices in API design, highlighting areas for improvement.
• Design Artifacts: Produce required design artifacts, independently or as part of a team.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Engage with key stakeholders in workshops to achieve desired outcomes.
• Architecture Review: Present to the Customer's Architecture Review Board when necessary.
• Alignment: Ensure solutions align with strategic architecture principles and direction.
• Design Review: Review designs and code produced by technical teams to ensure alignment with the overall solution design.
• Delivery Support: Support the delivery lead by breaking down the solution for iterative delivery in sprints.
• Requirements Monitoring: Review requirements and monitor change requests to ensure the solution design remains fit for purpose.

Essential Skills & Experience:

• Solution Architecture: Highly experienced in designing solutions for large-scale API integration projects and programs.
• REST API Design: Deep knowledge of REST API design principles, with experience in creating Swagger/RAML definitions.
• API Security: Experience with API security standards such as mutual authentication, OAuth, and OIDC.
• Domain Driven Design: Understanding of Domain Driven Design (beneficial).
• API Management Platforms: Expertise in industry-standard API management platforms (e.g., MuleSoft, Apigee, Kong, AWS API Gateway).
• Microservices: Experience in modeling, building, and deploying large-scale distributed microservices using Java and Spring Boot.
• Cross-Cutting Concerns: Deep expertise in observability, logging, monitoring, and error handling.
• Monitoring Tools: Knowledge of industry-standard solutions like Splunk or ELK (beneficial).
• Public Cloud: Expertise in any public cloud (AWS preferred).
• Integration Patterns: Knowledge of Enterprise Integration Patterns, with a deep understanding of Kafka (beneficial).
• DevOps Solutions: Expertise in industry DevOps solutions (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab, AWS CodePipeline).
• Financial Services: Financial services experience (advantageous).

Leadership: Ability to lead and take ownership of complex deliveries.