Senior Backend API Engineer

About Vanguard
Founded in 1975, Vanguard is one of the world's leading investment management companies. The firm offers investments, advice, and retirement services to tens of millions of individual investors around the globe—directly, through workplace plans, and through financial intermediaries.

Vanguard India

Vanguard’s office in India is a significant milestone in our global expansion. We are committed to establishing an enduring technology center in Hyderabad, Telangana and are excited to be adding talent who will focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI), mobile, and cloud-based technologies that drive our business outcomes and deliver a world-class experience for our clients.  

Role Summary

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Backend API Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise-grade APIs, integration services, and backend platforms that power digital products, data products, AI applications, and business workflows.

This is primarily a software engineering role (80%) focused on modern API development, platform engineering, cloud-native services, and developer productivity. The remaining 20% supports data engineering initiatives by enabling trusted access to enterprise data assets and integrating with modern cloud data platforms.

The ideal candidate combines strong backend engineering fundamentals with experience building scalable APIs, developer platforms, observability solutions, and AI-assisted software development workflows.

Responsibilities

API and Backend Engineering (80%)

·        Design, develop, and maintain scalable GraphQL and REST APIs.

·        Build cloud-native microservices using TypeScript and modern backend frameworks.

·        Develop reusable backend services supporting digital, AI, analytics, and data-product initiatives.

·        Design and implement API contracts, versioning strategies, and service integrations.

·        Build MCP servers, consumable by AI Agents

·        Build secure APIs using OAuth2, JWT, OpenID Connect, and enterprise security standards.

·        Develop event-driven and asynchronous processing solutions.

·        Create reusable SDKs, libraries, and developer enablement tools.

·        Implement observability, logging, monitoring, and alerting using Splunk, PagerDuty, Honeycomb with OpenTelemetry.

·        Optimize service performance, scalability, reliability, and resiliency.

·        Collaborate with product owners, architects, and engineering teams to define enterprise integration patterns.

·        Use Claude Code and similar AI coding tools to accelerate development, testing, documentation, and code quality.

·        Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews, and engineering standards development.

·        Support CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code, and DevSecOps practices.

Data Engineering and Platform Integration (20%)

·        Develop API layers that expose trusted enterprise data products.

·        Integrate backend services with Databricks, AWS Redshift, and other cloud data platforms.

·        Support data-pipeline development and data-movement patterns.

·        Partner with data engineers to enable real-time and batch data access.

·        Contribute to logical and physical data modeling.

·        Support AWS Glue-based ingestion and transformation workflows.

·        Help establish standards for data quality, metadata, and governance integration.

Qualifications and Skills

• Minimum 8 years of relevant work experience, with at least 4 years in designing and maintaining data pipelines, ETL processes and database architectures.
• Bachelor’s degree (B.E./B.Tech) in Computer Science or IT, or Bachelor’s in Data Science, Statistics, or related field.
  

Backend and API Development

·        TypeScript: advanced hands-on proficiency

·        GraphQL API design and development

·        REST API design and development

·        MCP Server design and development

·        Node.js and modern backend frameworks

·        Microservices architecture

·        API gateway technologies

·        OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and JWT authentication

·        CI/CD and DevOps practices

·        Git and modern source-control workflows

·        Claude Code

·        Splunk monitoring, logging, and observability

·        Event-driven architecture and messaging systems

Cloud and Platform Engineering

·        AWS cloud services

·        Infrastructure as Code, with Terraform preferred

·        Automated testing frameworks and quality-engineering practices

Desired Data Engineering Skills

·        AWS

·        Data-pipeline development

·        Data modeling

·        Databricks

·        AWS Redshift

·        AWS Glue

·        Apache Spark

·        Data quality and governance

·        Real-time and batch data processing

Preferred Experience

·        Building enterprise-scale API platforms.

·        Developing backend services that support AI and machine-learning solutions.

·        Enabling agentic AI and AI-assisted development workflows.

·        Working in highly regulated enterprise environments.

·        Supporting mission-critical, high-volume production systems.

·        Building platforms that serve multiple engineering teams through reusable APIs and shared services.

Success Measures

·        Increased API reuse across engineering teams.

·        Reduced integration-development effort through standardized services.

·        Improved platform reliability, observability, and scalability.

·        Faster software delivery through AI-assisted development workflows.

·        Strong adoption of engineering standards, security controls, and API governance practices.

·        Reduced operational incidents through proactive monitoring and automated testing.

Location

This role is based in Hyderabad, Telangana at Vanguard India. Only qualified external applicants will be considered.

Our mission

Vanguard adheres to a simple purpose: To take a stand for all investors, to treat them fairly, and to give them the best chance for investment success.

Our commitment to you 

Vanguard takes the same long-term view of your success—at work and in life—with Benefits and Rewards packages that reflect what you care about, throughout all the phases and stages of your life. Our Total Rewards programs provide you and your loved ones with wellness support for key areas in your life: 

Financial wellness 
We're committed to enabling your financial success and provide competitive offers and programs. 

Physical wellness 
We're committed to providing benefits that support your physical health and wellness. 

Personal wellness 
We're committed to providing resources that help support the full scope of your life. 

How we work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for most of our employees (crew members), designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.