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.

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

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

API designAPI governanceRESTful APIsAI-enabled APIsMicroservicesCI/CDTest driven developmentBehavior driven developmentMulti-threaded applicationsData structures and algorithms

Soft Skills

LeadershipCollaborationAnalytical skillsJudgmentMentoringCommunicationAbility to work under pressureEagerness to contributeBalancing innovation with stabilityConsumer-centric approach