API Support Engineer (Tier 3) – Federal/DoD Mission
Remote
United States
Posted 3 weeks ago
This is a senior, fully remote API Support Engineer (Tier 3) role focused on troubleshooting and resolving complex API, integration, and data flow issues across enterprise applications within a large federal and DoD-aligned mission environment. This role serves as the highest escalation point, requiring in-depth diagnostic support for API consumers, backend systems, and integration middleware, ensuring resilience and service restoration.
- Location: Fully Remote (US).
- Clearance: Must hold an active Top Secret clearance (supported by a Tier 5 background investigation).
- Experience: Minimum 6 years in API support, backend troubleshooting, or application technical support.
- Certifications (Required): ITIL v4 Foundation and CompTIA Security+.
- Focus: Resolving Tier 3 escalations, data mapping, authentication issues (OAuth2, SAML, JWT), root cause analysis, and validating API behavior against OpenAPI/Swagger specifications.
Duties & Responsibilities: Escalation, Diagnosis, and Validation
The engineer provides expert-level diagnosis and acts as a key liaison between support and development teams.
- Complex Resolution: Resolve complex API issues escalated from Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, including endpoint failures, schema mismatches, and authentication problems.
- Triage & RCA: Triage enterprise-wide API incidents, diagnose data mapping issues, payload inconsistencies, and transformation logic errors. Perform root cause analysis (RCA) by collecting logs and analyzing error patterns.
- API Validation: Validate API behavior against OpenAPI/Swagger specifications, schemas, and version requirements. Assist in testing API changes prior to deployment.
- Cross-Functional Partnership: Work closely with development, integration, cloud, and cybersecurity teams to reproduce issues, validate fixes, and address security concerns (OAuth2, SAML, JWT).
- Documentation & Governance: Document findings and resolutions in the knowledge base. Participate in Change Control Board (CCB) processes when fixes affect production integrations.
Required Technical Knowledge
The role requires strong foundational knowledge of API architecture, security, and enterprise environments.
- API Fundamentals: Strong knowledge of REST APIs, endpoint communication, and data structures.
- Integration Troubleshooting: Experience diagnosing and resolving API defects, schema mismatches, and integration failures. Familiarity with middleware, integration layers, and message brokers.
- Security & Specs: Experience troubleshooting authentication and authorization flows (OAuth2, SAML, JWT). Experience working with JSON schemas, OpenAPI/Swagger specifications, and API documentation.
- Logging & Monitoring: Experience analyzing logs from API gateways, application servers, or integration pipelines. Familiarity with monitoring tools used for API health.
- Preferred Knowledge: Experience with AWS GovCloud integration patterns, knowledge of event-driven architectures, and experience with scripting/automation for diagnostics.
Job Features
| Job Category | Data, Information Technology, Support Service |