API Engineer

As a Software Engineer II – API Engineering, you will design, develop, and optimize RESTful APIs and backend services that power Trepp’s enterprise-grade platforms. You’ll work primarily in TypeScript/JavaScript and focus on building performant, scalable, and reliable systems. This role emphasizes strong backend engineering fundamentals, efficient coding practices (time/space complexity), and leveraging Node.js/TypeScript’s event-driven runtime for reactive and asynchronous workflows.

Responsibilities

REST API & Backend Development (Must-have Focus)

• Design, implement, test, and maintain RESTful APIs and backend services using TypeScript/JavaScript (Node.js).
• Apply API design best practices: consistent resource modeling, validation, pagination, error handling, versioning, and backward compatibility.
• Implement secure authentication/authorization patterns as needed (e.g., JWT, OAuth2, API keys, RBAC).

Performance & Efficient Engineering

• Write efficient, production-quality code with clear awareness of time and space complexity, choosing appropriate data structures and algorithms.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks (latency, throughput, memory usage) through profiling and targeted optimization.
• Apply caching and data-access optimization patterns to improve responsiveness and reduce load (e.g., leveraging Redis appropriately).

Event-Driven & Reactive Coding

• Build services that leverage the event-driven nature of Node.js/TypeScript, including async/await, streaming, and message-based workflows.
• Implement resilient asynchronous patterns (idempotency, retries, backoff, dead-letter handling where applicable).
• Ensure workflows are observable and debuggable through structured logs, metrics, and tracing.

Data Stores & Persistence

• Design and implement storage strategies and access patterns across data stores, including: (1) Relational: PostgreSQL (schema design, query optimization, migrations); (2) Cache/Key-Value: Redis (TTL, invalidation strategies, cache-aside patterns) and (3) NoSQL: experience with at least one of DynamoDB (key design and access patterns) OR MongoDB (document modeling)
• Make pragmatic tradeoffs around consistency, transactions, performance, and maintainability.

External API Integrations

• Integrate with third-party/external APIs and internal services with strong handling of timeouts, retries, rate limits, and circuit breakers.
• Design for schema evolution and backward compatibility when upstream providers change.
• Follow secure secret management and credential rotation practices; build maintainable, testable adapters/clients.

Quality, Delivery & Collaboration

• Participate in code reviews and contribute to team standards for readability, maintainability, and reliability.
• Write unit/integration tests and support CI/CD pipelines to enable fast, safe deployments.
• Partner with product, QA, and other engineering teams to deliver high-quality solutions.

Required Qualifications

• 5 years total professional software engineering experience.
• 3 years backend engineering experience building production services in TypeScript and JavaScript, with strong proficiency.
• Must-have: Proven RESTful API design/development experience with strong command of HTTP methods and HTTP status codes.
• Strong understanding of Node.js/TypeScript asynchronous and event-driven runtime behavior (non-blocking I/O, concurrency patterns).
• Demonstrated ability to write efficient code and reason about performance using time/space complexity concepts.
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL and Redis, plus experience with at least one NoSQL datastore (DynamoDB or MongoDB).
• Experience integrating with external APIs, including reliability patterns (timeouts, retries, rate limiting) and secure handling of credentials/secrets.
• Strong debugging skills and familiarity with observability fundamentals (logging, metrics, tracing).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AWS (e.g., Lambda, API Gateway, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, ECS/EKS).
• Experience with event-driven architectures and asynchronous messaging patterns (pub/sub, queues, eventual consistency).
• Experience with serverless computing and understanding of operational/performance tradeoffs (cold starts, concurrency limits, cost considerations).
• Familiarity with containerization and CI/CD (e.g., Docker, GitHub Actions).
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and deployment tooling (e.g., Terraform, Serverless Framework).
• OpenAPI Specification (Swagger) documentation experience for API definition, documentation, and collaboration.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Datadog, CloudWatch, ELK/OpenSearch) and API security best practices.

Salary

• Base salary starting from $165k plus bonus eligible

Benefits and Perks

• Base target bonus compensation structure
• Medical, Dental, Vision insurance
• 401K (with employer match)
• Student Debt Retirement Plan
• Life insurance, long term disability, short term disability all covered by the company
• Flexible paid time off (PTO)
• Sixteen (16) weeks paid primary caregiver leave (Biological, adoptive, and foster parents are all eligible)
• Four (4) weeks paid parental leave
• Pet insurance
• Laptop (company issued) WFH equipment reimbursement
• Career progression plan
• Pre-tax commuter benefit with company subsidy (For NYC-office based employees only)
• Involvement in Diversity and Inclusion programs
• Fun company events and volunteering opportunities

Applicants for employment in the US must have work authorization that does not now or in the future require sponsorship of a visa for employment authorization in the United States and with Trepp (i.e., H1-B visa, F-1 visa (OPT), TN visa, or any other non-immigrant status).

Workplace Policy

NYC, Dallas, and London office-based positions: Trepp’s offices follow a 3–2 hybrid-working policy with the expectation of in-office work on Tuesday–Thursday and the option to work from home on Monday and Friday. Trepp maintains a drug-free workplace.