Senior API Architect

More Link Innovation; Abu Dhabi; Remote; AED 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

More Link Innovation in the United Arab Emirates is seeking a Senior API Architect to lead API strategy, governance, integration design, and platform modernization across enterprise applications and digital ecosystems.

The ideal candidate will establish scalable API standards, guide teams in designing high-quality APIs, and ensure APIs are secure, discoverable, and reusable while aligning with business and technology objectives.

Qualifications

• Proven experience designing enterprise-scale API architectures and integration platforms.
• Strong understanding of API design principles, REST, HTTP, JSON, and SOA.
• Experience with event-driven, asynchronous, messaging, webhook, and distributed integration patterns.
• Strong knowledge of API gateways and API-management platforms.

Responsibilities

• Develop and oversee enterprise API architecture strategies aligned with business goals.
• Define API architecture principles, standards, patterns, reference architectures, and guidelines.
• Establish enterprise API strategy covering internal, external, partner, and public APIs.
• Develop API roadmaps aligned with modernization, digital transformation, and integration priorities.
• Design scalable, secure, resilient, high-performance APIs for enterprise apps and platforms.
• Define API boundaries, contracts, resources, operations, data structures, and interaction models.
• Establish standards for RESTful, event-driven, and asynchronous architectures.
• Define API design standards including naming, versioning, pagination, filtering, and error handling.
• Establish API documentation standards and ensure discoverability.
• Develop reusable API patterns, templates, and reference implementations.
• Lead API architecture reviews and provide guidance to engineering and integration teams.

Skills

API architecture

Enterprise integration

Distributed systems

Security (OAuth/OpenID)

Job description

We're Hiring: Senior API Architect

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to building scalable, secure, connected, and high-performing digital platforms across diverse markets.

Our technology teams collaborate across Architecture, Software Engineering, Product, Data, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Integration, Infrastructure, and business functions to create reliable digital services and integration capabilities that connect applications, partners, customers, and operational systems.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior API Architect to lead API architecture, strategy, governance, integration design, API lifecycle management, and platform modernization across enterprise applications and digital ecosystems.

The ideal candidate will establish scalable API standards and architectures, guide teams in designing high-quality APIs, strengthen interoperability across systems, and ensure APIs are secure, discoverable, reusable, observable, performant, and aligned with business and technology objectives.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and implement enterprise API architecture strategies aligned with business and technology objectives.


• Define API architecture principles, standards, patterns, reference architectures, and design guidelines.


• Establish an enterprise-wide API strategy covering internal, external, partner, and public-facing APIs.


• Develop API roadmaps aligned with application modernization, digital transformation, and integration priorities.


• Design scalable, secure, resilient, and high-performance APIs for enterprise applications and digital platforms.


• Define API boundaries, service contracts, resources, operations, data structures, and interaction models.


• Establish standards for RESTful, event-driven, asynchronous, and other appropriate API architectures.


• Define API design standards covering naming, versioning, pagination, filtering, sorting, errors, status codes, and response structures.


• Establish API documentation standards and ensure APIs are clearly documented and discoverable.


• Develop reusable API patterns, templates, reference implementations, and design assets.


• Lead API architecture reviews and provide technical guidance to engineering and integration teams.


• Review API specifications, technical designs, integration approaches, and implementation plans.


• Establish API governance processes, design-review checkpoints, and approval frameworks.


• Maintain architecture decision records covering API design decisions, trade-offs, dependencies, and risks.


• Define API lifecycle-management standards from requirements and design through development, publication, maintenance, versioning, deprecation, and retirement.


• Establish API versioning and backward-compatibility strategies.


• Define policies for API deprecation, migration, sunset processes, and consumer communication.


• Design API gateway and management architectures supporting routing, authentication, authorization, throttling, transformation, monitoring, and policy enforcement.


• Collaborate with Cloud and Infrastructure teams to design scalable API-management and integration platforms.


• Define API security architecture covering authentication, authorization, OAuth, OpenID Connect, tokens, encryption, secrets, and access controls.


• Work with Cybersecurity teams to identify and mitigate API-specific security risks and vulnerabilities.


• Establish standards for input validation, rate limiting, threat protection, abuse prevention, and secure API exposure.


• Ensure APIs comply with applicable security, privacy, regulatory, and data-protection requirements.


• Define API access-control models for internal applications, customers, partners, and third-party consumers.


• Design API integration patterns connecting enterprise applications, databases, SaaS platforms, external services, and legacy systems.


• Establish standards for synchronous and asynchronous integration, messaging, event streaming, and webhook architectures.


• Collaborate with application architects and software engineers to define appropriate service boundaries and API contracts.


• Work with Product Managers and Business Analysts to translate business capabilities into reusable API services.


• Identify opportunities to expose business capabilities through reusable APIs.


• Promote API-first and contract-first development practices where appropriate.


• Define API productization strategies for internal, partner, and external consumers.


• Establish API catalogs, developer portals, service registries, and API discovery capabilities.


• Improve API discoverability, reuse, adoption, and developer experience.


• Define standards for API documentation, developer onboarding, examples, SDKs, testing tools, and support resources.


• Collaborate with Developer Experience teams to improve API consumer onboarding and integration workflows.


• Establish API observability standards covering logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, and operational monitoring.


• Define API performance, availability, scalability, reliability, and capacity requirements.


• Monitor API latency, throughput, error rates, availability, traffic patterns, and resource utilization.


• Identify API performance bottlenecks and coordinate architectural improvements.


• Design resilient API architectures with appropriate retry, timeout, circuit-breaker, caching, failover, and graceful-degradation mechanisms.


• Establish API reliability and disaster-recovery requirements for critical services.


• Support load testing, performance testing, security testing, and resilience validation.


• Analyze API incidents, integration failures, availability issues, and recurring technical problems.


• Lead or support root-cause analysis and develop corrective and preventive actions.


• Develop strategies for legacy API modernization, service extraction, integration simplification, and platform migration.


• Assess existing APIs and identify opportunities for consolidation, standardization, reuse, and retirement.


• Reduce duplicate APIs, inconsistent interfaces, unnecessary integrations, and unmanaged technical debt.


• Define API migration strategies for legacy applications and replacement platforms.


• Evaluate API-management products, integration platforms, gateway technologies, developer portals, and supporting tools.


• Assess third-party API solutions and vendor architectures against enterprise standards.


• Support technology evaluations, procurement activities, vendor assessments, and solution selections.


• Establish API cost-management and capacity-planning practices.


• Monitor API platform consumption, infrastructure requirements, licensing costs, and operational expenses.


• Collaborate with Data teams on API data models, data contracts, data quality, and data-access requirements.

Key Performance Indicators

• API architecture compliance


• API design review completion


• API governance compliance


• API standards adoption


• API specification quality


• API documentation completeness


• API availability


• API uptime


• API response time


• API latency


• API throughput
  
• API error rate
  
• API transaction success rate
  
• API scalability
  
• API reliability
  
• API incident frequency
  
• Mean time to resolve API incidents
  
• API security compliance
  
• API vulnerability remediation
  
• Authentication and authorization compliance
  
• Rate-limit policy compliance
  
• API traffic monitoring coverage
  
• API observability coverage
  
• API consumer adoption
  
• API reuse rate
  
• API consumer satisfaction
  
• Developer onboarding time
  
• API integration delivery time
  
• API implementation success rate
  
• API contract compliance
  
• Backward-compatibility compliance
  
• API version-management effectiveness
  
• API deprecation compliance
  
• API retirement completion
  
• API modernization progress
  
• Legacy API reduction
  
• Duplicate API reduction
  
• API platform cost efficiency
  
• API infrastructure utilization
  
• API deployment success rate
  
• Automated API test coverage
  
• Contract-test coverage
  
• Security-test coverage
  
• API documentation usage
  
• Developer-portal adoption
  
• Architecture risk reduction
  
• Technical debt reduction
  
• Stakeholder satisfaction
  
• Engineering team capability development
  

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in API architecture, integration architecture, software architecture, digital platforms, enterprise integration, or distributed systems, preferably within a complex enterprise, technology, financial, commercial, or international business environment.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Proven experience designing enterprise-scale API architectures and integration platforms.


• Strong understanding of API design principles, REST, HTTP, JSON, and service-oriented architectures.


• Experience with event-driven, asynchronous, messaging, webhook, and distributed integration patterns.


• Strong knowledge of API gateways, API-management platforms, developer portals, and service registries.


• Experience developing API standards, governance frameworks, reference architectures, and design guidelines.


• Strong understanding of API lifecycle management, versioning, compatibility, deprecation, and retirement.


• Experience designing secure APIs using OAuth, OpenID Connect, tokens, authentication, authorization, encryption, and access controls.


• Strong understanding of API security threats, abuse prevention, rate limiting, and secure integration practices.


• Experience with API observability, logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring, and operational support.