API Platform Architect - Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, API Management

Role: API Platform Architect – Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, API Management

Location: London, UK (Hybrid)

Employment type: Contract

Key Responsibilities & Requirements

1. Architecture Leadership & Platform Ownership

• Own the architecture, design, standards, patterns, and roadmap of the enterprise API Platform across Azure, AKS, APIM, networking, security, observability, and DevOps layers.
• Translate business, security, and domain requirements into scalable, secure, highly available platform architectures.
• Provide authoritative architectural guidance while remaining hands-on with implementation, debugging, optimisation, and reviews.
• Define and govern API standards, APIOps pipelines, lifecycle processes, platform SLAs/SLOs, and security enforcement.

2. Azure Cloud Expertise

• Extensive expert-level, hands-on experience with Azure services, including:
• AKS, APIM, Application Gateway, Front Door, Load Balancers, Event Hub, Azure SQL, Storage Account, ACR, Key Vault, VNets, Private Endpoints, Application Insights, Azure Monitor, Notification Hub, DNS, VMSS, App Configuration, and more.
• Architect multi-region active-active, blue/green, and zero-downtime deployments.
• Deep understanding of Azure networking, identity, private connectivity, and cost optimisation.

3. Terraform & Infrastructure-as-Code

• Design, implement, and govern complex Terraform modules for Azure and Kubernetes using providers such as azurerm, azapi, kubernetes, helm.
• Ensure Terraform best practices, module versioning, automated validations, state management, and environment consistency.
• Drive platform provisioning automation and self-service capabilities.

4. Kubernetes (AKS) Architecture & Operations

• Expert-level knowledge and hands-on experience with:
• AKS cluster architecture, node pools, workload identity, pod security, network policies
• Helm chart authoring, deployment strategies, custom charts, container registries
• Ingress controllers, API gateways, service mesh, and traffic policy enforcement
• Observability (Prometheus, Grafana), log pipelines, distributed tracing
• High availability, cluster upgrades, autoscaling strategy, performance tuning
• Lead advanced troubleshooting (pods, networking, DNS, controllers, storage, ingress).

5. Azure API Management (APIM) & API Security

• Deep hands-on expertise in APIM features including advanced policy writing, transformations, caching, throttling, JWT validation, OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS, IP filtering, client certificate handling.
• Design the end-to-end API lifecycle, including APIOps automation, environment promotion, deployment versioning, api backend health check frameworks, and rollback strategies.
• Implement API analytics, distributed tracing, alerts, performance tuning, and troubleshooting.

6. Reliability Engineering & Platform Operations

• Lead root-cause analysis, high-severity incident resolution, and resilience improvements.
• Ensure uptime, performance, and reliability of APIs deployed in AKS and exposed via APIM.
• Define SLOs, latency budgets, retry strategies, and resilience patterns (circuit breaker, timeout patterns, queue-based ingestion).
• Implement auto-remediation, self-healing patterns, and fault-tolerant architecture.

7. DevOps & Automation

• Drive GitOps-driven Kubernetes deployments using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, ArgoCD/Flux.
• Own APIOps pipeline definition for APIM deployments, testing, API versioning, and documentation automation.
• Establish CI/CD pipelines for Terraform, .NET API builds, image scanning, SAST/DAST, compliance enforcement.

8. Hands-On .NET Core API Integration & Code Reviews

• Review .NET Core API implementations to ensure correct API design, platform alignment, and cloud-native best practices.
• Provide architectural guidance for .NET API integrations with APIM, AKS, event-driven components, caching, and security layers.
• Analyse and optimise API performance, scalability, dependency injection usage, resiliency patterns, and distributed system design.
• Work with backend teams to ensure APIs are structured for observability, traceability, platform compatibility, and API governance.
• Occasionally step into the codebase to triage issues, debug complex integration problems, and provide code-level recommendations.

9. Leadership, Collaboration & Mentoring

• Lead platform engineering discussions, architectural reviews, and technical deep dives.
• Mentor engineers in cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, Terraform, API design, DevOps, and .NET integration patterns.
• Influence stakeholders across engineering, security, product, and operational teams.
• Take full ownership of delivery outcomes with a high sense of urgency and quality.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field with 12+ years of industry experience
• Strongly preferred: Azure certifications (AZ-305/400), Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD/CKS), Terraform certifications.
• 7+ years in cloud engineering/architecture roles, including platform ownership and hands-on development/troubleshooting.