PHP Developer

Lead API Engineer - IND

Engineering - Hyderabad, Telangana

About Gradera

At Gradera, we’re defining a new category of enterprise transformation called Software-Orchestrated Services™ (SoS™) — a governed blend of human expertise and digital intelligence that transforms how enterprises operate.

Our mission is to build intelligent digital workers that augment teams and automate work across the value chain, helping organizations become more efficient, agile, and resilient.

We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions. Every engagement is tailored to the unique needs of each enterprise — grounded in governance, security, and reliability. By aligning technology with strategy, we empower our clients to achieve measurable outcomes and lead with confidence in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Lead – API Engineer

Overview

Key Responsibilities

•Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to the API engineering team

•Lead the design, implementation, and evolution of API architecture and backend services

•Champion API-first development, ensuring clear contracts and comprehensive documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger)

•Lead the implementations of APIs conforming to all NFRs including security, scalability, and performance.

•Ensure robust authentication, authorization, and data protection for all endpoints

•Drive adoption of best practices in API design, versioning, and integration

•Optimize API performance for low-latency, high-frequency interactions

•Oversee observability, monitoring, and alerting for all APIs and backend services

•Collaborate closely with product, UI, and runtime teams to deliver integrated solutions

•Collaborate with the SDET to ensure comprehensive test coverage and effective test data creation

•Lead the adoption of modern API tools, frameworks, and best practices

•Ensure engineering rigor, code quality, and documentation standards are met

•Facilitate clear communication, knowledge sharing, and effective documentation within the team

•Support team growth through coaching, feedback, and skills development

Core Qualities & Skills

•Proven experience leading API or backend engineering teams and delivering complex API projects

•Deep expertise in API architecture, design, and implementation (RESTful, GraphQL, gRPC etc.)

•Strong programming skills in relevant backend languages (e.g., Node.js, Python, Java, Go, etc.)

•Experience with API security, authentication, and authorization (OAuth, JWT, RBAC, PKCE, define fine-grained access controls using ReBAC)

•Experience with API documentation and standards (OpenAPI/Swagger, Use Case, JSON Schemas, etc.)

•Familiarity with data serialization with Protofbuf

•Experience with some API gateway is a must

•Strong understanding of performance optimization, scalability, and reliability for APIs

•Experience with observability, monitoring, and troubleshooting for backend services

•Strong collaboration and alignment skills across disciplines

•Willingness to learn, share knowledge, and adapt to evolving technologies

•System design skills and awareness of technical debt and tradeoffs

•Excellent communication, documentation, and stakeholder management abilities

•Comfort with ambiguity, discovery, and rapid change

•Commitment to engineering excellence, security, and responsible practices

Preferred Qualifications

•7+ years of hands-on API or backend engineering experience, with 2+ years in a technical leadership role

•Track record of architecting and delivering scalable, reliable API systems

•Experience with modern development practices (CI/CD, automated testing, code reviews)

•Demonstrated ability to mentor and grow engineers

•Experience working in cross-functional, agile teams

Highly Desirable

•Experience with API gateways (e.g., Envoy, Kong, Apigee) and service mesh patterns (e.g., Istio)

•Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures (pub/sub, callbacks, Kafka, etc.)

•Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and automated provisioning (e.g., Terraform)

•Experience building developer portals and self-service onboarding for APIs

•Experience with API Gateways (Apache APISIX, KrakenD, …)

•Ability to perform API Domain Modelling with a strong product orientation, aligning technical design with user and business needs

•Experience thriving in fast-paced, ambiguous environments and balancing rapid delivery with technical excellence

•Experience leading or working with distributed, multidisciplinary teams

Success Metrics

•API response time (median and p95)

•Uptime and reliability of critical services

•Test coverage for API and backend logic

•Developer velocity and time from API design to production

•Time to First Prototype (TTFP)

•Integration lead time for API consumers

•Technical debt reduction and architectural alignment

•Team growth, engagement, and retention

•Stakeholder satisfaction and cross-team collaboration

.Overall 5+ years of experience in application development using Java with creating and deploying microservices using the Spring Boot framework







• Strong experience in Maven.







• Good experience in unit(Junit) and integration testing.







• Experience in Microservices is a must.







Experience in designing and developing REST based services / Microservice development.







• Candidate should have good communication skills (written and verbal)







Excellent analytical and problem solving skills







Any one of these database Mongo, Maria, RMQ, Postgres, or other NoSQL servers







• Experience in AWS and CI/CD







5+ Years







Design, develop, and maintain robust, scalable, and secure backend services and APIs.







• Collaborate with frontend developers to integrate user-facing elements with server-side logic.







Write clean, efficient, and maintainable code following best practices and coding standards.







• Optimize performance and ensure high availability of backend services.







• Implement security measures to protect sensitive data and prevent vulnerabilities.







Design and manage databases, ensuring data integrity and efficient query performance.







Debug, troubleshoot, and resolve issues in production and development environments.







• Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to team members.







Stay up-to-date with emerging backend technologies, frameworks, and best practices.







• Participate in Agile/Scrum ceremonies and contribute to sprint planning and estimations.

In this role, you will:

• Integrate user-facing elements developed by front-end developers.
• Build efficient, testable, and reusable PHP modules.
• Solve complex performance problems and architectural challenges.
• Integrate data storage solutions.

You may be a fit if you have:

• 2 – 4 years of experience in building PHP web frameworks such as Lavarel.
• Understand the fully synchronous behavior of PHP.
• Understanding of MVC design patterns
• A proficient understanding building rich UI & front-end technologies, such as JavaScript,

HTML5, and CSS3.

• Working knowledge of object-oriented PHP programming
• Understanding of accessibility and security compliance.
• Strong knowledge of the common PHP or web server exploits and their solutions.
• Experience in using fundamental design principles for a scalable application.
• Knowledge of user authentication and authorization between multiple systems, servers, and environments.

• Knowledge of Integrating multiple data sources and databases into one system.
• Familiarity with limitations of PHP as a platform and its workarounds.
• Understanding of creating database schemas that represent and support business processes.
• Familiarity with SQL/NoSQL, Postgresql databases and their declarative query languages

Company Description

SteelEye is a fast growing FinTech company based in London and has offices in Bangalore and Paris, that offers a data platform to help financial institutions such as Investment Banks, Hedge Funds, Brokerage Firms, Asset Management Firms to comply with financial regulations in the European Union. Our clients can aggregate, search, surveillance and report on trade, communications and market data. SteelEye also enables customers to gain powerful insights from their data, helping them to trade with greater efficiency and profitability.

The company has a highly experienced management team and a strong board, who have decades of technology and management experience and worked in senior positions at many leading international financial businesses.

We are looking to hire a seasoned Sr API Developer to join us as we start on our next phase of growth. We have a culture of openness, collaboration, and the passion to get things done whilst appreciating the importance of a good work life balance.
Being part of a start-up can be equally exciting as it is challenging. You will be part of the SteelEye team not just because of your talent but also because of your entrepreneurial flare which we thrive on at SteelEye. This means we want you to be curious, contribute, ask questions and share ideas. We encourage you to get involved in helping shape our business.

SteelEye is a fast growing FinTech company based in London and has offices in Bangalore and Paris, that offers a data platform to help financial institutions such as Investment Banks, Hedge Funds, Brokerage Firms, Asset Management Firms to comply with financial regulations in the European Union. Our clients can aggregate, search, surveillance and report on trade, communications and market data. SteelEye also enables customers to gain powerful insights from their data, helping them to trade with greater efficiency and profitability.

The company has a highly experienced management team and a strong board, who have decades of technology and management experience and worked in senior positions at many leading international financial businesses.

We are looking to hire a seasoned Sr API Developer to join us as we start on our next phase of growth. We have a culture of openness, collaboration, and the passion to get things done whilst appreciating the importance of a good work life balance.
Being part of a start-up can be equally exciting as it is challenging. You will be part of the SteelEye team not just because of your talent but also because of your entrepreneurial flare which we thrive on at SteelEye. This means we want you to be curious, contribute, ask questions and share ideas. We encourage you to get involved in helping shape our business.

Job Description

What you’ll do

• Develop new features and functionality in SteelEye's best breed SaaS application
• Work on setup API Developer for our growing SaaS product
• Ensure the software is up-to-date with latest technologies
• Triage issues and enhance core features of our existing API's for rapidly growing client base
• Design and architech our API layer solving problems around scale and performance
• Be part of great team building a fantastic product!

What we’re looking for

• You are experienced Python Developer, with minimum 5 years in commercial Python experience
• You have experience building REST-based API's using Flask, Django or FastAPI in a production environment
• You have excellent knowledge of data structures, software design patterns and software architecture
• You are comfortable working in a fast-paced environment and can adapt to changing requirements
• You have experience with code versioning (Git) and CI/CD (Jenkins, Circle, etc..) tools
• Familiarity/Experience with Elasticsearch is a huge plus
• Familiarity/Experience with FastAPI nice to have
• You are experienced Python Developer, with minimum 5 years in commercial Python experience
• You have experience building REST-based API's using Flask, Django or FastAPI in a production environment
• You have excellent knowledge of data structures, software design patterns and software architecture
• You are comfortable working in a fast-paced environment and can adapt to changing requirements
• You have experience with code versioning (Git) and CI/CD (Jenkins, Circle, etc..) tools
• Familiarity/Experience with Elasticsearch is a huge plus
• Familiarity/Experience with FastAPI nice to have