Sr. Director of Engineering - API
About The Position
Babel Street is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead its API and Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform strategy and delivery as the company evolves toward an AI-native, agent-driven platform. This hands-on senior technical leadership role will define and deliver API-first capabilities that enable developers and AI agents to interact with Babel Street services. The role leads the design and implementation of semantic APIs, MCP integrations, and context-aware service patterns for next-generation intelligence workflows. The position partners closely with AI, Data, Platform, product, and engineering teams to make APIs and services consistent, discoverable, scalable, and optimized for agentic workflows. It also works with the Architecture function to align platform decisions with the company’s broader architectural vision while focusing on execution and delivery. The role is hybrid from the Reston, Virginia, or Somerville, Massachusetts, office; full remote may be considered. The API and MCP platform will serve as an interface layer between data, AI, and product capabilities. The role establishes API-first strategy, service design and governance standards, agent-ready API patterns, MCP integration approaches, semantic interfaces and documentation practices, and context-management patterns such as caching, session and state management, and memory-aware interactions. It will build reusable frameworks, provide technical leadership and mentorship, partner with Google and other vendors, and drive adoption of platform standards across engineering teams. The anticipated outcomes are to assess the current platform and define strategy in the first 30 days; deliver initial frameworks and standards, begin semantic API rollout, and establish an MCP integration approach within 60 days; and achieve production agent-ready APIs, deployed MCP-enabled services, adopted platform standards, and measurable improvements in API consistency and developer velocity within 90 days.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience.
- Experience operating at Principal Engineer or Staff+ level.
- Strong hands-on experience building distributed systems.
- Experience designing and building API-first platforms.
- Experience with cloud-native architectures; GCP is preferred.
- Experience building developer platforms or service-oriented architectures.
- Strong system-design and architectural-thinking skills.
- Proven ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives.
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on work with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Familiarity with Vertex AI Agent Engine.
- Background in ADK and reasoning frameworks such as LangChain.
- Understanding of the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- Exposure to data warehouse technologies such as BigQuery and Snowflake.
- Knowledge of Apigee or similar API gateway solutions.
- Proven ability to design semantic APIs for AI or agent-driven use cases.
- Experience managing context or building memory systems.
- Development of agent-based architectures or orchestration frameworks.
- Exposure to Anti-Gravity.
Responsibilities
- Partner with Architecture to define and lead Babel Street’s API and MCP platform strategy.
- Design and deliver semantic, agent-ready APIs.
- Establish MCP standards and implementation patterns.
- Define context-management patterns for agent workflows.
- Partner with AI and Data teams to enable agent-native architectures.
- Establish API governance and platform standards.
- Build foundational frameworks and reusable components.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentorship.
- Partner with Google and other vendors on platform capabilities.
- Drive adoption of API and MCP standards across engineering teams.
- Define standards and patterns for API design, versioning, discoverability, governance, consistency, reliability, and performance.
- Lead MCP patterns for service exposure, tool and service discovery, agent-to-service communication, and context-aware interactions.
- Define agent-optimized API descriptions, schema consistency, semantic modeling, discoverability, and documentation-as-code practices.
- Define context-aware API and service patterns for context management and retrieval, caching, session and state management, and memory-aware interactions.
- Assess current API and platform architecture, identify standardization opportunities, and deliver initial platform frameworks and standards.
- Work with product and engineering teams to establish APIs as first-class platform capabilities.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance; Babel Street covers 85–100% of monthly premium costs for the employee and family.
- Traditional and Roth 401(k) with a competitive match.
- Unlimited flexible leave.
- 12 paid Federal Holidays.
- Tuition reimbursement for continuing education.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
