Senior Backend Engineer – API Design & Development

About the job

We’re hiring a Senior API Product Engineer in Pune!

Be part of our growing international tech team building innovative telecom platforms for European market.

About Peoplefone:

Founded in Zurich in 2005, peoplefone started as a bold idea to transform telecommunications — and we’ve been growing ever since. Now active in seven European countries and licensed telecom providers in five others, we’re a dynamic and forward-thinking organization committed to innovation in VoIP and telecom services.

🌐 Learn more: www.peoplefone.com

What We’re Looking For:

We are looking for a Senior API Product Engineer to design and develop customer-facing APIs as reliable, secure and easy-to-use products. This is not only a backend development position. You will work with product teams, internal developers, customers, and integration partners to understand their use cases, determine which capabilities and data should be exposed, and translate those requirements into clear and evolvable API contracts.

You will own API design from the initial use case through contract definition, implementation, documentation, testing, publication and lifecycle management.

Your impact:

• Understand real usage – Gather and challenge API requirements together with customers, partners, product owners and internal teams, and understand how their developers will consume what we expose.
• Design contract-first – Design every API using a contract-first approach with OpenAPI: agree resources, operations, schemas, error models, pagination, filtering, idempotency and async patterns before implementation starts, and use the contract as the source of truth for docs, mocks and tests.
• Decide what's exposed – Work with product, architecture and security to decide what data and operations may be exposed, and translate business capabilities into intuitive, consistent API resources and workflows.
• Build production-grade APIs – Implement and maintain the REST APIs you design, with clean versioning, deprecation and backward-compatibility strategies so partner integrations never break unexpectedly.
• Secure by design – Define authentication and authorization, scopes and roles appropriate to customer- and partner-facing use cases.
• Enable integrators – Create accurate documentation, examples and reference integrations, and support customers and partners directly during their integration work.
• Close the loop – Establish automated contract, integration, security and performance testing, and feed real API-consumer feedback back into the design.
• Raise the bar platform-wide – Define API design guidelines and reusable standards that other development teams adopt.
• Work as one team – Participate in daily stand-ups, sprint reviews and retrospectives, with code reviews, pair programming and CI/CD as standard practice.

What You Bring

The Must-Haves:

• 8+ years of backend software engineering experience, including significant time designing and building APIs in production
• Hands-on experience defining API contracts with OpenAPI/Swagger, and comfort treating the spec as a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought
• Proven ability to design resources, schemas, versioning and backward-compatibility strategies for APIs consumed by external customers or partners — not only internal services
• Solid understanding of API security fundamentals: OAuth 2.0/OIDC, scopes, roles and data-exposure controls
• Confident handling of relational databases and writing clean, maintainable, well-tested code (automated unit/integration tests as standard practice)
• Experience working directly with customers, partners or third-party integrators to gather requirements and support their integration work
• Self-organized, a strong communicator, and comfortable owning a feature or capability from initial use case through go-live
• Good written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear developer-facing documentation

Nice-to-Haves:

• Telecom/VoIP domain experience.
• Experience with PHP 8.x, Laravel & OOP
• Frontend experience (Vue 2/3, CSS, React)
• Familiarity with contract/schema testing tools (e.g. OpenAPI diffing, Spectral, contract test frameworks)
• Experience with containers and CI/CD pipelines (Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI)
• Monitoring stack exposure: Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch
• Atlassian tooling: Jira, Confluence.
• Agile mindset and experience with Scrum methodologies

Why Join peoplefone?

• Young, international team - short communication paths, direct decisions
• Daily challenges in an open, innovative environment with a team that supports and inspires each other
• Training time and budget allocated for your growth
• Career Growth opportunities into an evolving team