Senior Staff Software Engineer | API

DeepL DeepL · AI Frontier · New York, NY · Engineering

This role focuses on building and scaling the API infrastructure and platform for DeepL, enabling enterprise adoption and accelerating engineering velocity. While DeepL is an AI company, this specific role is centered on the engineering of the API platform that serves their AI products, rather than the direct development or research of AI models themselves. The role emphasizes scalability, reliability, security, and enabling other teams through platform standards and tooling.

What you'd actually do

  1. Drive API Strategy & Scale: Architect a hyper-scalable infrastructure designed to support exponential growth in traffic and data volume. You will set the technical vision for our microservices, ensuring our systems remain resilient, secure, and performant as we scale to the next tier of usage.
  2. Enable the Partner Ecosystem: Lead the technical side of strategic partnerships, building integrations with AWS Marketplace and enterprise SaaS providers. You will own the delivery of "Trust" features—such as granular billing, residency controls, and auditability—that are essential for closing enterprise deals.
  3. Force-Multiply Engineering Velocity: Establish rigorous platform standards (contracts, versioning, security) that raise the bar for the entire organization. By building self-service tooling and automated quality gates, you will empower product teams to deploy independently without breaking production.

Skills

Required

  • API strategy
  • distributed systems
  • API platform architecture
  • cloud stacks
  • backend technologies
  • automated testing
  • operational discipline
  • enterprise integration
  • compliance
  • security
  • data residency
  • strategic communication
  • technical proposals
  • RFC writing
  • stakeholder influence

Nice to have

  • AI tools for software development
  • AI-assisted engineering practices

What the JD emphasized

  • 10+ years in software engineering
  • high-scale distributed systems
  • API platform architecture
  • modern cloud stacks
  • backend technologies
  • automated testing
  • operational discipline
  • enterprise landscape
  • compliance
  • security
  • data residency challenges
  • integration patterns
  • strategic communication
  • clear strategic proposals
  • RFCs
  • influencing stakeholders