Manager, API Platform Engineering

About the role

The Manager, API Platform Engineering leads a technical team to deliver UFCU's enterprise service layer—a portfolio of APIs, integrations/orchestrations, and enterprise microservices used by internally developed applications, AI initiatives, and approved third-party vendors/partners. Reporting to the Director of Platform Engineering, this is a hands-on, "player-coach" technical leadership role that blends people management with architecture accountability.

Responsibilities

• Lead an engineering team consisting of API/Integration and Microservices resources delivering reliable, secure, reusable enterprise services and APIs.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership including: Architecture reviews, technical design guidance, and engineering sign-off for APIs, integrations, and microservices.
• Establish and maintain reference architectures and engineering standards.
• Own the API platform roadmap and governance, including: API design standards, documentation (e.g., OpenAPI), versioning, lifecycle management, and deprecation policies.
• Consistent patterns for error handling, idempotency, resiliency, and backward compatibility.
• Guide MuleSoft Anypoint Platform delivery and operations, including: API lifecycle management, policy enforcement, reusable assets, orchestration patterns, and runtime monitoring.
• Performance tuning, release readiness, and operational stability.
• Lead enterprise microservices engineering using C#/.NET, Kubernetes, and Azure, including: Service boundaries and domain alignment, contract-first/service-first approaches, CI/CD, automated testing strategies, and secure SDLC quality gates.
• Observability practices: metrics, logs, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerts.
• Ensure production reliability and operational excellence by: Establishing incident response practices, runbooks, post-incident reviews, and problem management.
• Define and track SLAs/SLOs, MTTR, reliability trends, and capacity planning.
• Embed security and compliance into engineering practices, partnering with Security/Risk/Compliance to ensure: Secure API and service patterns (OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS where appropriate, secrets management, encryption at rest/in transit, least privilege), audit readiness (change management, evidence collection, and operational controls).
• Enable internal teams, AI initiatives, and vendors by delivering: A clear enterprise service catalog and onboarding documentation, supportable integration patterns and certification/testing approaches for vendor consumption.
• Manage delivery execution and team operations, including: Agile planning (Scrum/Kanban), prioritization, dependency management, and stakeholder communication.
• Hiring, coaching, performance management, and contractor augmentation management.

Requirements

• Minimum 5+ years leading engineering teams (people management, delivery accountability, coaching/development).
• Experience delivering microservices (Java/C#/.NET) and deploying to Kubernetes.
• Proven experience delivering and operating enterprise APIs and/or integration platforms in production environments.
• Experience guiding teams building scalable backend services including CI/CD and operational ownership.
• Demonstrated experience leading architecture reviews and enforcing engineering standards (design patterns, security, reliability).
• Experience integrating with enterprise observability tools (i.e. Grafana, Datadog etc.).
• Ability to work hybrid with 2-3 days/week on-site in the Austin, TX area.
• Willingness and ability to lead incident response when necessary.

Qualifications

• Strong leadership capability with a platform mindset—building reusable, well-governed services that enable other teams.
• Deep knowledge of API engineering best practices, including: RESTful design, versioning strategies, lifecycle management, security policies, throttling, documentation, and governance.
• Hands on experience with C#/.NET.
• Solid understanding of integration and orchestration patterns, including synchronous/asynchronous approaches, retries, dead-letter handling, and resiliency.
• Solid understanding of microservices architecture and distributed systems concepts: Service boundaries, reliability patterns (timeouts, circuit breakers), data ownership considerations, performance, and scalability.
• Practical knowledge of modern engineering practices: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, code quality gates, security scanning, and deployment strategies.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills: Ability to translate technical tradeoffs into business impact and align cross-functional partners.

Skills

• Knowledge of BIAN concepts for capability/service domain alignment and service taxonomy (preferred).
• Experience in financial services or another regulated environment with strong security/compliance expectations.
• Experience scaling delivery with a mix of FTE and contractor resources, including vendor/contract management.

Benefits

Flexible work schedule with 2-3 days per week on-site at the UFCU Plaza building.

Pay

Competitive salary commensurate with experience.

Schedule

Hybrid work model with 2-3 days per week on-site at the UFCU Plaza building, and 50% remote work.