API Architect

Mindlance; Houston (TX); Remote; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mindlance is seeking a Platform API Design Lead in the United States (Houston area) for a 12-month contract with potential conversion to FTE. The role focuses on API design as products, event-driven architecture, and integration with AWS services across the insurance and retirement platform.

You will lead cross-functional teams, shape strategy, mentor engineers, and explore AI-assisted development patterns to accelerate delivery while maintaining security and governance.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of development and integration experience.
• Strong API-first design and cloud background.
• Experience guiding developers and designers in enterprise-scale delivery.
• Experience with Agile methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Lead integration delivery for the Acquisition Platform ensuring alignment with standards.
• Define APIs as products and drive scalable API-driven solutions.
• Collaborate with Product and Platform teams to translate requirements into designs.
• Mentor and guide development teams; promote continuous improvement.

Skills

API Design standards

API as Product

Domain-driven design

External partners collaboration

Event-driven architecture

API contracts standardization

Microservices mindset

AWS environments experience

Cross-functional collaboration

AI-assisted development tools

Financial services exposure helpful

Tools

AWS

Job description

Location options: Houston/Raleigh-Durham/Jersey City/Remote

Contract: 12 months (contract extension or most likely FTE conversion)

Skills required:

• Defines API design standards and strategy across the platform
• Senior, consultative role:
• Defines APIs as products and applies domain-driven design
• Works with external partners and internal stakeholders
• Focus areas:
• Event-driven architecture
• Standardization of API contracts
• Minimal hands-on coding expected
• Strong API-first and microservices mindset
• Experience working within AWS environments
• Ability to operate effectively in cross-functional, evolving environments
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (such as GitHub Copilot) is highly preferred
• Financial services or insurance experience is helpful but not required

About the role-

What you need to know:

Transforming our digital product offering across the insurance and retirement value chain. Our Acquisition team is delivering a next-generation platform for the submission and processing of new applications for our insurance and retirement products. This platform will help automate and reduce manual work to shorten the time to issue a new policy/contract to customers.

The Platform API Design Lead for the Acquisition Platform is a pivotal role responsible for enabling connectivity across multiple systems using PBC (Packaged Business Capabilities) principles. This role emphasizes headless data exposure and scalable service design to ensure seamless integration and efficient data flow across the platform. The ideal candidate will possess a deep understanding of integration strategies, modern integration patterns, and the ability to drive innovation in a dynamic environment.

What we’re looking for:

Integration Strategy and Architecture:

• Develop and lead the integration delivery for the Acquisition Platform, ensuring alignment with business objectives and technology standards.
• Lead the implementation of scalable and maintainable APIs as products
• Deliver according to architectural blueprints, integration patterns, and best practices to guide development teams.

Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement:

• Collaborate with the Product Team, Product Architect, and Platform Engineering Lead to understand integration requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Engage with cross-functional teams to ensure alignment of integration solutions with overall platform goals and enterprise standards.

Implementation and Development Support:

• Guide and support implementation teams during the development and deployment of integration solutions.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to development teams, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

AI-Assisted Development and Agentic Integration

• Leverage AI-assisted development techniques (e.g., prompt engineering, structured prompting, and human-in-the-loop workflows) to accelerate API, integration, and orchestration development.
• Co-develop integration solutions alongside AI tools to improve design quality, documentation, test coverage, and delivery speed.
• Explore and introduce agent-based patterns (e.g., tool calling agents, workflow agents, or MCP-style orchestration) where appropriate to automate integration tasks, environment interactions, or operational workflows.
• Identify opportunities where AI-enabled automation can reduce manual effort, improve resiliency, or simplify complex cross-system interactions.
• Stay current with industry trends and innovations to continuously improve the integration landscape.
• For third-party integrations, help select the optimal integration pattern and provide rationale, proving through Proof of Concepts or Proof of Value engagements where possible

Compliance and Security:

• Ensure integration solutions adhere to enterprise architecture standards, security protocols, and industry regulations.
• Conduct security assessments and audits to identify and mitigate risks.
• Collaborate with security teams to influence the maturity of standards and policies where unique needs of the Acquisition Platform are concerned.

Leadership and Talent Development:

• Work with the IT leadership team to embrace contemporary ways of working, attract and develop talent across the firm, and leverage economies of scale and shared capabilities.
• Promote a culture of collaboration, innovation, and excellence within the integration and development teams.
• Identify and address skill gaps, providing training and development opportunities to team members.

Technical Skills and Competencies

• API Strategy – vision and plan to extract value from API economy
• API and Microservice design principles – API as a Product, Contract First, Bounded Context, High Cohesion, Low Coupling, CQRS, Event-Driven Design
• API Security – OAuth 2.0, OIDC
• API rate limiting*** throttling
• AI-assisted design techniques - prompt engineering and iterative co-design with large language models
• Responsible AI use - including consideration of security, data exposure, and operational risk
• API performance and reliability – memory leak detection, high-volume, low-latency response, fault-tolerant design (i.e., circuit breaker pattern)
• API observability – distributed tracing, APM telemetry instrumentation
• Growth-oriented mindset – ability to think beyond constraints of today and identify what is required to build the future
• Excellent communication skills – ability to translate needs and issues between tech and product/business teams

Required Experience

• 7+ years of development experience
• Experience guiding developers and designers
• Strong API and cloud background
• API Management experience with external partners
• Experienced in applying Agile methodologies
• Enterprise-scale delivery with both onshore and offshore cross-functional teams

Preferred

• Experience in financial services, insurance, or retirement services industry
• AWS Deployment Experience – AWS API Gateway, X-ray, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, ECS, EKS, Lambdas, EventBridge Design.

EEO-

“Mindlance is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment based on – Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans.”