Staff Engineer (APIs)

We are looking for a forward-thinking and experienced Staff API Engineer to define and drive Admiral’s API strategy, standards, and platform enablement. This senior technical role will focus on building scalable, secure, and maintainable API services while setting the direction for API lifecycle management, governance, and consumption across the organisation.

You will work closely with engineering squads, architects, and platform teams to ensure our APIs are well-designed, discoverable, versioned, and aligned to modern integration patterns. You’ll also guide adoption of API tooling and platforms such as TIBCO, Apigee, or Azure API Management, contributing to a robust internal and external developer experience.

The Staff Engineer will play a key role in mentoring other engineers, championing engineering maturity, and supporting the evolution of Admiral’s broader integration and digital platform strategy.

Main Duties

Technical Leadership & API Strategy

• Define and maintain the organisation’s API strategy, including standards for design, documentation, versioning, security, and lifecycle management.
• Establish and evolve reusable API design patterns, working closely with architects and platform teams.
• Guide platform adoption and integration of API gateway/orchestration tools (e.g. TIBCO, Apigee, Azure API Management).
• Support consistent enforcement of API governance policies, authentication mechanisms (OAuth2, JWT), and API analytics.
• Contribute to the long-term roadmap for API enablement, developer tooling, and discoverability.

Design, Development & Enablement

• Design and build Spring Boot-based APIs that are scalable, testable, and well-structured.
• Lead or support squads in the delivery of high-impact integration solutions across services and platforms.
• Collaborate on reusable API assets such as SDKs, templates, shared schemas, and common middleware.
• Implement robust error handling, logging, and observability across services and endpoints.
• Promote automation of API tests, documentation, contract validation, and pipeline integration.

Collaboration & Engineering Maturity

• Act as a subject matter expert for APIs across squads and tribes, supporting design reviews, peer mentoring, and training.
• Participate in planning, backlog refinement, and sprint activities as a senior technical voice.
• Collaborate with architecture, security, and governance teams to align APIs with organisational principles.
• Contribute to Chapter and Guild forums, raising the bar for API engineering across the organisation.
• Lead efforts to reduce technical debt, improve platform resilience, and accelerate onboarding for new API consumers.

Experience Required

Technical Expertise

Essential:

• Strong commercial experience building APIs using Java and Spring Boot in a production environment.
• Deep knowledge of RESTful API design, including best practices for resource modelling, pagination, and error handling.
• Proven experience with API versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with OpenAPI/Swagger specifications and API documentation tooling.
• Solid understanding of API security, including OAuth2, API keys, scopes, JWT, and rate limiting.
• Strong testing experience, including contract testing, unit, integration, and end-to-end tests.
• Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, and infrastructure-as-code concepts.

Desirable:

• Experience with API gateway/orchestration platforms, such as TIBCO, Apigee, or Azure API Management.
• Experience with asynchronous patterns, such as event-driven architecture or messaging queues (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Familiarity with containerisation (Docker) and deployment in Kubernetes environments.
• Exposure to GraphQL and other modern API approaches.

Behavioural Competencies

• Strategic Thinking: Aligns API design and platform tooling with organisational goals and future scalability.
• Technical Leadership: Mentors engineers, shares best practices, and supports consistent implementation across teams.
• Collaboration: Works across squads, architecture, and platform areas to unify integration approaches.
• Communication: Explains complex API design choices clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Accountability: Takes ownership of engineering quality, platform reliability, and strategic delivery.
• Continuous Improvement: Actively identifies opportunities to simplify, standardise, or automate aspects of API delivery.

Please note, due to high volumes, application reviews may take up to 2 weeks

Admiral: Where You Can

We take pride in being a diverse and inclusive business. It's a place where you can Be You, and show up as you are. We’re committed to fostering a people-first culture where everyone is accepted, supported, and empowered to be brilliant. You can, Grow And Progress at a pace and direction that suits you, Make A Difference for our customers and each other, and Share in Our Future with all colleagues eligible for up to £3,600 of free shares each year after one year of service.

Everyone receives 33 days holiday (including bank holidays) when they join us, increasing the longer you stay with us, up to a maximum of 38 days (including bank holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to an additional five days of annual leave.

We’re proud of our people-first culture. In fact, we've been recognised as a Great Place to Work for Women, a Great Place to Work for Wellbeing, and an overall Great Place to Work for over 25 years! We’re fully committed to making sure your progression is not slowed or halted by barriers related to race, gender, age, sexuality or any of the protected characteristics.

Our fantastic benefits make sure our colleagues have a great work-life balance; You can view some of our other key benefits here.

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