API Developer

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About the role

Job Description: API Developer       Our Team:   The API Developer designs, builds, and maintains the APIs that connect enterprise systems, digital products, and external partners. This is a hands-on engineering role responsible for producing well-designed, robust, scalable, secure, well-documented APIs that other teams can discover and reuse for communication between internal products, third-party platforms and client-facing applications.  The API platform is run both as an internal product and as a managed service. The API Developer works contract-first, publishing APIs to the enterprise catalogue and developer portal, and builds the reusable components, templates, and policies that raise the standard of every API delivered across the organisation.  Kong is the primary gateway, operating alongside Apigee, Azure API Management, and AWS API Gateway across a multi-cloud estate on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The role therefore values transferable, gateway-agnostic API skills as highly as any single product.     Main responsibilities:     API Design and Development  • Design and build APIs contract-first using Open API/Swagger, applying enterprise design standards, naming conventions, and versioning policy.  • Develop synchronous and asynchronous APIs across REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and event-driven patterns documented with AsyncAPI.  • Build domain and experience APIs that expose business capabilities cleanly, abstracting the complexity of underlying systems.  • Develop reusable API components, policies, plugins, and templates that other teams consume as a starting point.  Gateway and Runtime Implementation  • Implement and configure API proxies, routes, plugins, and policies on Kong Gateway and Kong Konnect.  • Deploy and operate gateway components on Kubernetes using the Kong Ingress Controller and GitOps workflows.  • Implement traffic management including rate limiting, throttling, caching, retries, and circuit breaking.  Security and Access Control  • Implement robust authentication and authorization mechanisms (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, mutual TLS, API keys patterns)  • Ensure APIs comply with regulatory and data privacy requirements (GDPR, GxP where applicable)  • Integrate with enterprise identity providers including Entra ID and Okta.  • Manage secrets and certificates through HashiCorp Vault, CyberArk, and cloud-native key services.  Quality, Testing, and Automation  • Build automated contract, functional, integration, security, and performance tests for every API.  • Maintain CI/CD pipelines for API delivery using GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps, including linting and specification validation.  • Integrate static analysis, dependency scanning, and SBOM generation using SonarQube, Snyk, and equivalent tooling.  Operations and Support  • Instrument APIs for observability using OpenTelemetry format.  • Contribute during incident response, root-cause analysis, and problem management for API services.  • Build proactive monitoring services relying on Predictive ML.  • Support consumers through onboarding, troubleshooting, and clear technical guidance.  Technical Craft and Engineering Practices  • Write clean, tested, peer-reviewed code managed in Git using trunk-based practices.  • Use AI-assisted engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot and Claude Code to accelerate development, test generation, and documentation, applying appropriate review and technical judgement.  • Favour reuse and shared components over bespoke, single-purpose implementations.  Collaboration and Ways of Working  • Work within an agile product team with a shared backlog and defined customers.  • Partner with integration engineers, application teams, and data teams to agree interfaces and contracts.  • Engage wit

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