Principal - API Services

Principal - API Services:

Location:  Onsite - Austin TX, Auburn Hills MI

1099 Contract to start with ability to go full time long term.  

Contract length 12 months

Responsible for developing and maintaining robust APIs, core services, and global infrastructure that power our client’s digital ecosystem. This role ensures high availability, scalability, and reliability while enabling seamless integrations and enhancing customer experiences across all products worldwide.

Requirements

This list of duties and responsibilities is not all-inclusive and may be expanded to include other duties and responsibilities as deemed necessary.

• Engineering Vision: The Senior Manager of API Services & Core Infrastructure is a technical leader who drives the vision, strategy, and execution of API and infrastructure roadmap. They balance short-term deliverables with the long-term strategic vision for scalable, secure, and globally distributed backend services.
• Global Infrastructure Development: Advances core backend capabilities, ensuring infrastructure is designed for multi-region deployment, international data centers, and integration with global CDN services. Builds infrastructure that scales to support global expansion and customer base.
• API Design & Optimization: Leads the design, development, and optimization of RESTful and GraphQL APIs to ensure secure, efficient, and developer-friendly interfaces for internal and external consumers, with a focus on global reliability and latency optimization.
• Multi-Region Services: Oversees the development and deployment of multi-region services to provide fault tolerance, disaster recovery, and low-latency experiences for customers worldwide. Implements best practices for cross-region data replication and failover strategies.
• Cross-Discipline Collaboration: Responsible for orchestrating seamless integration between API, infrastructure, and services teams, ensuring cohesive efforts result in exceptional performance and reliability across all products. Achieves this through proactive communication, cross-functional workflows, and implementation of integrated development processes.
• Security & Compliance: Establishes and enforces best practices for securing APIs, infrastructure, and data across international markets while maintaining compliance with GDPR and other global data regulations.
• Scalability & Reliability: Ensures infrastructure and APIs are built to scale, supporting large-scale IoT deployments, real-time operations, and the demands of a growing global customer base.
• Team Development: Recruits, mentors, and develops a high-performing engineering team. Fosters technical excellence, collaboration, and leadership within the team. Focuses on developing other leaders and nurturing junior engineers to deliver exceptional global services.
• Execution Excellence: Has a proven track record of delivering complex, globally distributed projects at scale and on time, ensuring high-quality outcomes through rigorous architecture, execution, testing, and automation.
• Innovation: Drives the adoption of modern technologies, frameworks, and practices to keep client at the forefront of API, infrastructure, and global service development.
• Metrics & Reporting: Defines and tracks KPIs for API performance, uptime, and reliability across global regions. Regularly reports progress, challenges, and achievements to stakeholders.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s and/or Master’s in Computer Science or a related field.
• 12+ years of experience in engineering leadership roles, including managing backend services or infrastructure teams.
• Strong expertise in API development, including RESTful and GraphQL design, performance tuning, and security best practices.
• Proven experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS) and services like EC2, S3, RDS, and IoT-specific components, with a strong focus on multi-region deployments and cross-region failover.
• Expertise in building scalable infrastructure using tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Kubernetes to support global operations.
• Experience with CDN technologies and strategies for optimizing global content delivery and latency.
• Familiarity with international data center operations and the design of globally distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of network protocols, database design, and system optimization techniques for global-scale applications.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices to enable efficient software delivery.
• Demonstrated ability to manage large-scale, high-availability systems in production across multiple regions.
• Excellent communication (verbal & written) and presentation skills.
• Strong interpersonal and leadership skills.
• Maintains confidentiality of proprietary information.
• Ability to maintain a professional atmosphere in a fast-paced environment with numerous interactions and interruptions.
• A high degree of initiative, self-motivation, and ability to motivate others.
• Ability to establish and maintain cooperative working relationships with Team Members and colleagues.