API Architect

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +1 more country.

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and manage scalable APIs, microservices, and backend platform infrastructure utilizing Python and AWS.

• Take ownership of the architecture, continuous enhancement, and lifecycle management of the External Data API.

• Act as the technical liaison between SafelyYou’s internal data systems and its customers.

• Assist in advancing data governance tools, including registries and data dictionaries such as the Event Registry.

• Set up patterns and best practices for schema governance, versioning, documentation, and compatibility.

• Enhance and maintain internal APIs that provide data-system information to applications developed by SafelyYou engineers.

• Provide comprehensive documentation, implementation examples, and support while promoting best practices and ensuring adoption.

• Design and implement streaming data pipelines, transitioning from batch processing to real-time streaming architectures.

• Create and maintain Architecture Decision Records, API specifications, and system documentation.

• Optimize developer workflow and experience by refining CI/CD pipelines and repository documentation.

• Introduce and utilize AI agent workflows to boost engineering efficiency and monitor industry trends.

• Develop AI capabilities that third parties may leverage when interacting with SafelyYou APIs and data products.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align technical strategies with business objectives and support product launches and cross-team initiatives.

• Mentor team members, share technical knowledge, and participate in on-call rotations.

• Engage in hands-on implementation and support of the designed systems.

⛳️ Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience in software, backend, or platform engineering, ideally within a startup environment.

• Extensive expertise in designing, building, operating, and scaling RESTful APIs, web services, and distributed backend systems.

• Experience with designing and implementing API gateways and management systems such as Kong Hybrid, Apigee, Gravitee, or similar platforms.

• Strong opinions regarding authentication, routing, policy enforcement, observability, and deployment of API gateway solutions.

• High proficiency in Python, emphasizing clean, scalable, and maintainable backend code.

• Proven experience with streaming data architecture and technologies like Kafka, AWS Kinesis, or Spark Streaming.

• Experience in making architectural and cost trade-offs between batch streaming and synchronous processing.

• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.

• Basic DevOps practices, including containerization and deployment tools like Kubernetes and Helm charts.

• Excellent technical communication skills and a history of drafting ADRs, API specifications, and detailed architectural documentation.

• Experience managing CI/CD pipelines and enhancing developer environments.

• Hands-on experience with modern AI-assisted and agentic development workflows, including coding agents, MCP, AI pair programming, and LLM-powered research.

• Advanced proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools, such as Terraform.

• Experience in designing data models and architectures across ETL/ELT, warehouses, lakehouses, event-driven systems, and backend APIs.

• Strong foundations in data quality, reliability, governance, and scalability.

• Familiarity with electronic health records (EHR), healthcare interoperability standards like HL7 and FHIR, and related data privacy regulations such as HIPAA.

• Experience with remote work and distributed, asynchronous-first engineering teams.

• Candidates must be located in the United States or Canada.

🏝️ Benefits

• A mission-driven company culture.

• Fully remote work environment.

• Competitive salary and benefits package.

• Fully covered employee premiums for Medical, Dental, and Vision.

• 401k Program.

• Monthly stipends for Education, Well-being, and WFH expenses.

• Non-accrual PTO.

• Opportunities for growth.

• Company retreats.

• Medical and Family/Parental Leave.