Third Party API - Technical Lead

About the role

The Hartford is seeking an API Technical Lead/Product Owner to lead the strategy, delivery, and evolution of our enterprise Third Party Data API’s. This role is a hands-on engineering and technical product leadership role as an individual contributor, that provides direction, technical leadership, and mentoring for data engineers building Vendor Specific API’s.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive the API product vision and roadmap aligned to Enterprise Architecture, Data, and Integration strategies.
• Act as technical product owner and lead for enterprise and 3PD APIs, balancing technical scalability with business outcomes.
• Partner with domain teams and third-party vendors to design and deliver secure, reusable, and well-governed APIs.
• Translate business needs into clear technical requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria, ensuring delivery readiness.
• Provide technical leadership across the API lifecycle, including design reviews, integration patterns, error handling, and performance considerations.
• Guide teams on API standards, best practices, and governance, including versioning, documentation, and lifecycle management.
• Collaborate closely with Security, Architecture, Data Engineering, and SRE teams to ensure APIs meet enterprise risk, compliance, and reliability expectations.
• Monitor and optimize API usage, performance, and adoption, using metrics to inform roadmap and prioritization.
• Support future-state API and ecosystem capabilities, including event-driven integrations, data sharing, and partner enablement.
• Reliability Engineering Partnership: Partner with Reliability Engineering teams to ensure API’s meet enterprise availability, resiliency, observability and recoverability expectations. Support incident response, rootcause analysis, and continuous improvement related to API failures and data quality issues.
• User Enablement & Experience: Own documentation, onboarding materials, standards, and best practices. Partner with consumers to resolve delivery, quality, and usability challenges. Lead or contribute to API-focused communities of practice across the enterprise.
• Partner Collaboration: Partner with external providers, and internal consumers to support API requirements. Coordinate technical onboarding, delivery SLAs, and quality expectations with vendors and partners. Collaborate on proofs of concept and evaluations for new technologies and services. Collaborate with Performance Engineering, API COE and DAIO Architecture.
• FinOps & Operational Insight: Provide visibility into usage, throughput, performance, and cost drivers. Partner with engineering and vendor teams to implement cost and performance improvements across API implementations.

Qualifications

• Experience Leveraging AI to improve our products and services.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, integration, or API development, with at least 3 years in a Technical Product Owner or Technical Lead role.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and delivering RESTful APIs and integration solutions in complex enterprise environments.
• Experience working with API gateways, security models (OAuth, JWT, mTLS), and integration patterns.
• Proven ability to operate at the intersection of business, product, and engineering, translating strategy into execution.
• Experience working with third-party data providers, vendors, or external partners.
• Strong understanding of cloud-based architectures (AWS preferred) and modern DevOps practices.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred

• Experience in insurance, financial services, or other regulated industries.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, streaming, or data sharing platforms.
• Experience with API observability, monitoring, and reliability practices.
• Prior experience contributing to or leading enterprise integration platforms.
• Agile delivery experience, including backlog management and PI/Sprint planning.

About Us

We believe every day is a day to do right. And that belief has guided us for over 200 years. Showing up for people isn’t just what we do, it’s who we are. We’re devoted to finding innovative ways to serve our customers, communities and employees – continually asking ourselves what more we can do.