Lead API Platform Engineer (Cincinnati / Chicago) P181

About 84.51°

84.51° is a data science and technology company (owned by Kroger) that turns customer data into decisions that improve how people shop. Engineers here work with modern cloud and data tech at meaningful scale, alongside product, data science, and business teams.

The role

We’re hiring a Lead API Platform Engineer to join our Application Delivery team within Platform Engineering. This is an individual contributor (IC) technical lead role, owning the API gateway experience end-to-end — from pre-production through production. You’ll help shape technical direction, mentor engineers, and continuously improve our on-call/escalation rotation — participating and fielding gateway-related production issues when on rotation.

If you meet most—but not all—requirements, we still encourage you to apply.

What you’ll do

• Own our gateway platforms: Maintain and evolve our Kong Enterprise API Gateway and Azure Application Gateway configurations, standards, and best practices—and help design what’s next.
• Strengthen API security: Implement and promote API security standards, including OAuth2, JWT, and SAML, along with access controls and encryption.
• Improve reliability and performance: Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize using Datadog. Tune latency, caching behavior, and rate limiting to support high-performing APIs.
• Automate delivery: Build and maintain automation and CI/CD workflows (using GitHub Actions) for gateway deployments and policy/configuration updates.
• Enable great developer experience: Improve how teams build and test APIs by standardizing gateway onboarding, providing self-service patterns, and supporting reliable local development workflows (e.g., local gateway tooling, mock/test routes, and clear “run it locally” docs).
• Shape work for success: define and decompose scope into ready-to-build requirements (clear user stories and acceptance criteria), aligning on delivery standards, and proactively removing blockers to keep execution on track.
• Support production operations: Provide L2/L3 support, participate in an on-call rotation, lead root-cause analysis, and drive permanent fixes.
• Collaborate and document: Partner with development, QA, security, and architecture teams. Create clear documentation, SOPs, and onboarding materials to help teams ship confidently.

What we’re looking for

• Bachelor’s degree (Master’s degree desired) typically in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, Mathematics, Business Analytics or another technically strong program.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience operating API gateways in production environments (especially Kong)
• Strong API fundamentals (REST, JSON) and security best practices
• Experience working in a public cloud environment, plus solid networking knowledge (DNS, firewalls, load balancers) – Azure preferred but not required
• Comfort scripting and/or coding in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Shell, Java, Node.js)
• Familiarity with DevOps/Agile practices, Docker/Kubernetes/Helm, and Terraform (or other IaC tools)
• Clear communication skills and a collaborative mindset in a fast-moving environment

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