Sr. Developer, API

Position Purpose

We are seeking an experienced Sr. Developer, APIs to design, build, and maintain the API platform that powers YPO's member ecosystem, Chapter operations, and Agentic AI platform. You will write production-quality code and own the technical implementation of APIs that sit at the core of YPO's digital experience.

You will partner closely with Product, Data Architecture, IT, and Security to deliver scalable, semantic API solutions that meet rigorous technical, privacy, and governance standards. You will also serve as a key technical collaborator for internal engineering teams and integration partners - ensuring that every API surface is performant, well-documented, and safe to consume.

This role requires deep backend engineering expertise, a strong sense of API product quality, and the ability to translate complex integration requirements into robust, maintainable implementations that stand up at scale - within an event-driven, domain-aligned, serverless-first cloud 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 continuations.

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.

Work with Engineering leads ensuring reliable CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, observability via Datadog, alerti