Lead Software Engineer

Role Overview

• As a Lead Software Engineer – API Platform & Product Ownership, you will contribute to the design, governance, and evolution of Caterpillar’s API ecosystem, serving as the single‑threaded owner for assigned API products and domains.
• Act as the technical product owner for Parts eCommerce APIs, owning API contracts, versioning, and lifecycle management.
• Partner with Product Owners, Architects, and Business stakeholders to translate business capabilities into well‑defined, consumer‑centric APIs.
• Define and enforce API quality standards, including performance, security, documentation, and operational readiness.
• Represent assigned API domains in architecture reviews, API governance forums, and cross‑team design discussions, acting as the authoritative decision‑maker for API design and changes.
• Maintain hands‑on engineering capability, contributing code where appropriate, including API implementations, enhancements, and refactoring.
• Guide teams in designing RESTful, event‑driven, and domain‑aligned APIs, ensuring consistency across the eCommerce platform.
• Drive adoption of best practices for OpenAPI specifications and documentation.
• Ensure APIs are observable and operable, collaborating with SRE and platform teams on monitoring, alerting, and incident response.
• Collaborate with consuming teams to ensure APIs meet real‑world usage needs, balancing flexibility with platform stability.
• Mentor engineers and API consumers on API usage, design intent, and platform standards.
• Support integrated testing, consumer validation, and release readiness activities to ensure high‑quality API delivery.
• Participate in on‑call and off‑hours support rotations as needed for critical API products.

Requirements

• Position requires a four-year degree from an accredited college or university or equivalent working experience
• Software development experience or at least five years of experience with master’s degree in computer science or related field.
• Experience in designing and developing software applications or at least five years of experience in software application development with master’s degree in computer science or related field.
• Demonstrated ability to write, review, and debug production‑quality code.
• Experience designing, governing, or operating AI‑enabled APIs, including APIs that expose, orchestrate, or integrate with large language models (LLMs) or other AI services.
• Strong understanding of AI‑driven API interaction patterns.
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar approaches for standardizing how AI agents and tools discover, invoke, and exchange context with APIs.
• Understanding of agent‑to‑agent (A2A) interaction patterns, including how APIs are designed to safely support autonomous or semi‑autonomous agents operating across systems.
• Ability to define and enforce API contracts, rate limits, quotas, and policies appropriate for AI‑driven consumption patterns (e.g., bursty traffic, long‑running requests, token‑based cost controls).
• Ability to collaborate with Product, Security, Legal, and Architecture partners to ensure responsible, compliant, and scalable use of AI through APIs.
• Demonstrated judgment in balancing innovation with platform stability, particularly when introducing AI capabilities into customer‑ or dealer‑facing API products.
• Message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMq, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, Apache ActiveMQ, Kinesis, Azure Event Hub.
• Datastores such as DynamoDB, Aurora PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, MySQL, Oracle.
• Application architectural patterns, such as MVC, Microservices, Event-driven, etc.
• Deploying software using CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GoCD, Azure Devops, Confluence, etc.
• Experience deploying and maintaining software using public clouds such as AWS or Azure.
• Working within an Agile framework (ideally Scrum).
• Experience designing well-defined Restful APIs
• Experience writing API proxies on platforms such as Apigee Edge, AWS API Gateway or Azure API Manager
• Hands one experience with API tools such as Swagger, Postman and Assertible
• Test driven development and behavior driven development.
• Hands on experience with testing tools such as Cucumber and their integration into CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience using mocking frameworks and unit test frameworks
• Expertise writing and debugging multi-threaded applications
• Strong analytical skills.
• Must demonstrate solid knowledge of computer science fundamentals like data structures and algorithms and object-oriented design.
• Ability to work under pressure and within time constraints.
• Passion for technology and an eagerness to contribute to a team-oriented environment
• Demonstrated leadership on medium to large-scale projects impacting strategic priorities.

Tech Stack

• Apache
• AWS
• Azure
• Cassandra
• DynamoDB
• ElasticSearch
• Jenkins
• Kafka
• Microservices
• MongoDB
• MySQL
• Oracle
• Postgres
• RabbitMQ
• Redis

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits*
• Paid time off plan (Vacation, Holidays, Volunteer, etc.)*
• 401(k) savings plans*
• Health Savings Account (HSA)*
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs)*
• Health Lifestyle Programs*
• Employee Assistance Program*
• Voluntary Benefits and Employee Discounts*
• Career Development*
• Incentive bonus*
• Disability benefits
• Life Insurance
• Parental leave
• Adoption benefits
• Tuition Reimbursement