Senior API Architect

We're Hiring: Senior API ArchitectLocation: United Arab Emirates (Remote)Employment Type: Full-TimeExperience Level: SeniorWork Arrangement: Fully RemoteAbout UsWe 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 RoleWe 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 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 policies for API deprecation, migration, sunset processes, and consumer 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 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 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