Sr. Developer, API

Position Title:              Senior Developer, APIs Department:                Technology - Engineering - Digital Experience (DEx) Reports to (Title):        Head of Engineering Level/Sub-Level:          Operations Level / Professional ​   ☒Exempt                     ☐ Non-Exempt POSITION PURPOSE The Sr. Developer, APIs is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the API platform that supports YPO's member ecosystem, chapter operations, and agentic AI platform. This role owns the technical implementation of APIs that sit at the core of the digital experience and works closely with Product, Data Architecture, IT, and Security to deliver scalable, secure, and well-governed API solutions. The role requires strong backend engineering expertise, a high standard for API quality, and the ability to translate complex integration requirements into maintainable, production-grade systems within an event-driven, domain-aligned, serverless-first architecture. Your API Portfolio: You will own the engineering implementation of three core API domains: Members API Stable, semantic endpoints exposing member profile, identity, peer discovery, and graph relationships. The foundation of member experience. Chapters API APIs powering chapter management, forum operations, event discovery, and role-based data access across YPO's global regional structure. Agentic Ecosystem APIs Governed API contracts for AI agents (Peer Discovery, Event Discovery) built on OpenAI + RAG and Google Gemini. Agents consume only approved APIs. Agent reasoning must always be surfaceable. PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES 1. API Design & Implementation Design and implement production-grade RESTful and GraphQL APIs deployed via AWS API Gateway that are stable, semantic, and decoupled from vendor-specific backend schemas. Ensure all APIs conform to YPO's canonical ontology and global member graph. No endpoint may directly expose Salesforce object structures. APIs must map to govern entity definitions maintained in the enterprise data dictionary. Design APIs to operate within an event-driven architecture leveraging CDC, pub/sub messaging (Kafka and AWS EventBridge), and idempotent patterns. Apply Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles bounded contexts, ubiquitous language, and domain events to ensure API boundaries reflect business domains, not implementation details. Adopt a serverless-first approach using AWS Lambda, Step Functions, and EventBridge where appropriate, selecting stateful services only when serverless patterns are genuinely insufficient. Write clean, well-tested, and well-documented code across the Members, Chapters, and Agentic Ecosystem API domains. Define and enforce data models, versioning standards, authentication flows (Auth0 / Okta / OAuth 2.0), and integration patterns from first principles. Apply performance-aware design intentional pagination, caching strategies, query constraints, and rate-limiting so APIs scale safely under real-world load. Every API decision must reinforce member trust through privacy-first architecture, consent enforcement, and transparent data usage. Ensure every API response includes provenance and explanation metadata, so agent reasoning is always surfaceable to the member. 2. Agentic Ecosystem Engineering Implement the API governance layer that controls how YPO's AI agents (Peer Discovery, Event Discovery) interact with member data on OpenAI + custom RAG and Google Gemini. All agent-facing APIs must support structured retrieval, citation-ready provenance fields, consent-aware filtering, and deterministic fallback. Build and maintain kill-switch-capable API boundaries that prevent agents from ever consuming raw member data outside approved contracts. Instrument agent API integrations with feedback loop mechanisms hallucination rates, task success rates, and cost-per-outcome metrics must be observable and attributable to specific API behaviors. Collaborate with data science and ML teams to translate agentic data flow requirements into governed, tested API contracts. 3. API Lifecycle, Versioning & Governance Own the full API lifecycle: development, testing, documentation, versioning, deprecation, and migration planning. Every phase requires an explicit decision, no implied continuation. Establish and maintain engineering standards for API versioning, backward compatibility, and breaking-change policy. Build and maintain sandbox environments, integration test suites, and automated contract tests for every endpoint in the portfolio. Working with Engineering leads to ensuring reliable CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, observability via Datadog, alerting, and uptime SLAs. All infrastructure changes must be deployed via Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or AWS CDK) manual console changes in production are not permitted. 4. Cloud Architecture, IAM & Security Design and enforce IAM boundary design using least-privilege principles, permission boundaries, and Service Control Policies (SCPs) ensuring API-layer identities and Lambda execution roles cannot exceed governed data access boundaries. Operate within and contribute to YPO's multi-account AWS strategy (AWS Organizations, Control Tower) understanding how workload isolation, environment separation, and cross-account roles affect API deployment patterns and security boundaries. All cloud infrastructure must be defined and maintained as code using Terraform or AWS CDK this is a hard requirement, not optional practice. 5. Developer Experience & Enablement Produce and maintain clear API documentation, for example queries, and troubleshooting guides so internal teams can self serve without escalation. Support technical onboarding for new product teams and integration partners, ensuring APIs are discoverable, stable, and easy to consume. Identify and address developer friction proactively issues must never surface only via member complaints or downstre