Senior API Technical Specialist

Job Title: Senior Apigee X Specialist / Technical Lead

Location: Johannesburg, South Africa (Hybrid)

Experience: 8–10+ Years

Job Overview:

We are looking for an experienced Senior Apigee X Specialist / Technical Lead to lead API gateway engineering, platform standards, governance and operations across an enterprise API ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership for Apigee X, Apigee X Hybrid and Apigee Edge platforms.
• Design, manage and govern API proxies, API products, shared flows and gateway policies.
• Lead Apigee Edge to Apigee X migration, deployment and cutover activities.
• Establish API governance standards, security controls and best practices.
• Drive CI/CD automation, GitOps and Configuration as Code using Azure DevOps and Terraform.
• Manage API security, OAuth 2.0, JWT, API keys, TLS/mTLS and IAM/RBAC.
• Oversee API lifecycle management, Swagger/OpenAPI and Developer Portal integration.
• Support production troubleshooting, root-cause analysis and platform optimisation.
• Enable OpCo engineering teams and Managed Service Operations through technical guidance and knowledge transfer.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems or a related discipline preferred.

• Relevant Google Cloud, Apigee, API management, cloud security or architecture certifications are

advantageous.

• Equivalent demonstrable enterprise API-platform expertise may be considered in place of formal qualifications.

Experience

• 8-10+ years of professional software, integration, middleware or API engineering experience.

• 5+ years of substantial API gateway / API management experience, with deep hands-on Apigee capability.

• Strong production experience with Apigee X and practical understanding of Apigee Edge migration and hybriddeployment patterns.

• 3-5+ years operating as a Senior Engineer, Platform Specialist, Lead Engineer or Technical Lead in a complex enterprise environment.

• Demonstrated experience supporting multiple delivery teams, environments or business units from a shared API platform.

• Experience with platform migration, production cutover, rollback, incident management and post-migration hypercare.

• Experience transferring operational platform knowledge to support and managed-services teams.

Essential Technical Skills

• Google Cloud Apigee X and Apigee X Hybrid.

• Apigee Edge architecture and Edge-to-X migration assessment.

• API proxies, revisions, products, developers, apps, credentials, target servers, KVMs, shared flows, flow hooks and policies.

• OpenAPI / Swagger, REST APIs, JSON, YAML and API lifecycle governance.

• OAuth 2.0, JWT, API keys, TLS / mTLS and gateway security policies.

• Google Cloud IAM, RBAC, project/environment structures and service-account / workload identity concepts.

• Git, GitHub, Azure DevOps and CI/CD automation.

• Terraform and Configuration as Code / GitOps concepts.

• Networking fundamentals including DNS, routing, load balancers, VPN connectivity, ingress and IP whitelisting.

• API analytics, BigQuery concepts, operational monitoring and incident troubleshooting.

• Developer Portal integration and API consumer onboarding concepts.

• Production change governance, rollback, audit evidence and operational readiness.

Preferred Technology and Domain Experience

• Comparable multi-market telecommunications API platforms.

• Azure-hosted Developer Portal integration with Google Cloud Apigee.

• Kubernetes / AKS and hybrid runtime integration.

• Azure DevOps, GitHub governance, ServiceNow change and access-management processes.

• Akamai API Security or comparable API discovery and runtime-protection tooling.

• BigQuery, Looker, Grafana or related analytics/observability technologies.

• TM Forum Open APIs and telecommunications domains including customer, product, subscription, payment,messaging and identity.

• Enterprise support transition, SRE practices, SLIs/SLOs and managed-service operating models.