Senior Software Engineer – API Developer Experience
RemoteUnited Kingdom
Job Summary
Define and evolve API standards using OpenAPI, enforcing them through tooling, automation, and CI/CD workflows rather than manual review. Build systems that auto-generate, validate, and enforce API specifications, contracts, and schemas while integrating AI to improve specification quality, consistency, and documentation accuracy. Reduce bespoke implementations by providing shared patterns, libraries, and SDKs that teams use directly, enabling faster internal and partner integrations through well-defined, reliable, and documented APIs. Partner with engineering teams to migrate legacy APIs toward standardized patterns and make adoption easy through strong defaults and developer tooling. Participate in a mandatory 24/7 on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.
Required Qualifications
- 4+ years of software engineering experience with ownership of production systems, reliability, or operational improvements
- Strong backend development experience (Ruby, Node.js, or similar)
- Solid understanding of REST APIs, service contracts, API design, and software design principles
- Experience designing and maintaining scalable, consistent, and maintainable APIs in production environments
- Experience working across backend services, APIs, and production systems
- Experience building and operating services in AWS or similar cloud environments
- Good understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, and CI/CD
- Experience with observability, production debugging, and incident response
- Willingness to participate in a mandatory 24/7 on-call rotation
- Experience responding to production incidents and contributing to reliability improvements
- Experience using, or strong interest in, AI-powered development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor)
- Ability to evaluate and refine AI-generated code, APIs, specifications, and developer workflows
Desired Qualifications
- Deep experience with OpenAPI / Swagger and API contract design
- Experience building or enforcing API standards through tooling (linting, schema validation, code generation, CI/CD integration)
- Strong understanding of API lifecycle management — versioning, backward compatibility, deprecation strategies
- Experience building shared developer tooling, libraries, or platforms that improve consistency across teams
- Experience designing APIs for internal and external consumers (developer experience focus)
- Familiarity with contract testing and schema validation approaches
- Experience identifying and eliminating inconsistencies across APIs at scale
- Strong systems thinking — ability to balance flexibility, standardization, and developer velocity
- Experience using AI to improve API development workflows, including: Generating and refining API specifications from code or usage patterns, Validating contracts and identifying inconsistencies across APIs, Improving documentation quality and discoverability, Assisting in API design decisions and schema evolution, Analyze API usage patterns and inform design, versioning, or deprecation decisions
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