API Engineer

BGBx; Portugal; On-site; EUR 50,000 - 60,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health care insurance

Retirement plans

Generous paid time off & holidays

Wellness benefits

Life insurance

Learning and development opportunities

Job summary

BGBx in Portugal is seeking a Mid-Level API Engineer to help build a reusable API platform used across products. You’ll design secure APIs, implement authentication, and collaborate with product teams to deliver scalable backend capabilities.

You’ll work with Python or TypeScript, REST and GraphQL, and strong SQL skills, focusing on cross‑team reuse and robust security patterns in a fast‑moving environment that improves healthcare outcomes.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of experience building production APIs and backend services.
• Strong experience with Python or TypeScript.
• Solid understanding of API design using REST and GraphQL.
• Hands‑on experience with authentication and authorization in production systems.
• Experience designing APIs used by more than one application or consumer.
• Strong SQL skills and data modeling.
• Good understanding of application and API security principles.
• Experience with data-access or semantic-layer technologies.
• Ability to reason about technical trade-offs and communicate them clearly.

Responsibilities

• Design and build APIs consumed by multiple applications and services.
• Develop reusable platform capabilities rather than one-off integrations.
• Build and maintain APIs for business logic, data access, and analytical use cases.
• Design secure authentication and authorization patterns for different consumers.
• Implement fine-grained access controls and define trust boundaries between systems.
• Build custom services where standard tooling is not sufficient.
• Collaborate with application and product teams to translate requirements into platform capabilities.
• Establish API standards around contracts, error handling, versioning, reliability, performance, and security.
• Monitor and troubleshoot production APIs and improve performance and maintainability.

Skills

API design

Python/TypeScript

REST/GraphQL

Authentication/Authorization

Cross‑team APIs

SQL

Security principles

Data access / semantic layers

Trade-off communication

Job description

About Us

At BGBx, we're driven by a simple idea: breakthrough thinking creates breakthrough impact. As an independent commercial solutions partner to pharmaceutical and life science companies, we bring together strategists, scientists, communicators, creatives, technologists, and data experts to tackle some of healthcare's most important challenges. Our teams work across consulting and communications to help clients shape strategy, launch innovations, engage stakeholders, and drive meaningful results throughout the product lifecycle. The work is complex, fast-moving, and deeply connected to improving lives, creating opportunities for curious minds to make a real difference every day. If you're energized by collaboration, inspired by innovation, and motivated by work that matters, you'll find a place to grow, contribute, and make a meaningful impact at BGBx.

Position Overview

We’re looking for a Mid-Level API Engineer to help build and evolve a shared API platform used across multiple products and services. This is not a role focused on maintaining the backend of a single application. You’ll work on reusable platform capabilities that expose business logic, data, and contextual information securely and consistently to different types of consumers. We’re looking for someone who thinks beyond individual endpoints and is comfortable making practical decisions about API design, security, data access, and platform architecture.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build APIs that are consumed by multiple applications and services.


• Develop reusable platform capabilities rather than one-off integrations.


• Build and maintain APIs for business logic, data access, and analytical use cases.


• Design secure authentication and authorization patterns for different types of consumers.


• Implement fine-grained access controls and help define clear trust boundaries between systems.


• Build custom services where standard or generated API tooling is not sufficient.


• Work closely with application and product teams to turn different requirements into coherent platform capabilities.


• Help establish API standards around contracts, error handling, versioning, reliability, performance, and security.


• Monitor and troubleshoot production APIs and improve their performance and maintainability.


• Contribute to APIs and platform capabilities that support emerging AI-driven use cases.

What You Bring

• 3–5 years of experience building production APIs and backend services.


• Strong experience with at least one modern backend language, ideally Python or TypeScript.


• Solid understanding of API design using technologies such as REST and GraphQL.


• Hands‑on experience with authentication and authorization in production systems.


• Experience designing APIs or services used by more than one application, team, or type of consumer.


• Strong SQL skills and a good understanding of data modeling.


• Good understanding of application and API security principles.


• Experience working with modern data‑access, API, or semantic‑layer technologies.


• Ability to reason about technical trade‑offs and communicate them clearly.


• Comfortable working across application, data, and platform concerns rather than within a narrowly defined backend stack.

Nice to Have

• Experience building internal platforms or shared developer infrastructure.


• Experience with identity and access management systems.


• Familiarity with fine‑grained or policy‑based authorization models.


• Experience with analytical or semantic data layers.


• Familiarity with APIs or data‑access patterns designed for AI‑enabled applications.


• Experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability.

What Success Looks Like

You build APIs that are secure, reusable, understandable, and easy for other teams to consume. You can distinguish between something that should become a shared platform capability and something that should remain application‑specific, and you make sound engineering decisions without over‑engineering the solution.

Salary Range: €50,000 - €60,000 per year

What We Offer

At BGBx, we invest in our people because exceptional talent drives exceptional work. We provide a competitive rewards package designed to support your health, well‑being, professional growth, and life outside of work. Our benefits package typically includes health care insurance, retirement plans, generous paid time off and holidays, wellness benefits, life insurance, learning and development opportunities, and other resources that support our employees throughout their careers. Additional benefits may be available based on your location. Beyond benefits, you'll find a culture built on collaboration, innovation, inclusion, and the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on healthcare and the people it serves.

BGBx is an equal opportunity employer.All applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, citizenship status, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status or any category or class of person protected by law.