Sr. Director of Engineering - API

hatch I.T. is partnering with Babel Street to find a Sr. Director of Engineering. Please see details below:

About the Company

Babel Street is the trusted technology partner for the world’s most advanced identity intelligence and risk operations. They deliver advanced AI and data analytics solutions providing unmatched, analysis-ready data regardless of language, proactive risk identification, 360-degree insights, high-speed automation, and seamless integration into existing systems. Babel Street empowers government and commercial organizations to transform high-stakes identity and risk operations into a strategic advantage.  The actionable insights we deliver safeguard lives and protect critical assets around the world.  Babel Street is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, with regional offices in Boston, MA and Cleveland, OH, and international offices in Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, and the U.K.

Why This Role Matters:

This role will be instrumental to Babel Street’s AI-native technology strategy. The API and MCP platform will serve as the interface layer between data, AI, and product capabilities, enabling agents, developers, and systems to interact seamlessly. 

This is a high-impact, senior technical leadership role with broad influence across the organization and the opportunity to shape the future of Babel Street’s platform.  The position spans four core domains: 

API Platform & Strategy 

You will define and lead Babel Street’s API-first platform strategy, establishing consistent patterns for service design, versioning, discoverability, and governance. 

You will help evolve the platform toward agent-ready APIs, ensuring services are consumable by both human developers and AI agents. You will establish standards for API consistency, reliability, and performance across the organization. 

You will also work closely with product and engineering teams to ensure APIs are designed as first-class platform capabilities, not just service interfaces. 

MCP & Agent Integration 

You will lead Babel Street’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) strategy and implementation, enabling agents and AI systems to interact with services in a standardized and scalable way. This includes defining patterns for: 

MCP service exposure 

Tool and service discovery  

Agent-to-service communication  

Context-aware interactions  

You will partner closely with AI and platform teams to enable agent-native workflows across the organization. 

Semantic APIs & Agent-Ready Interfaces 

You will lead the design of semantic, agent-friendly APIs, where documentation becomes a first-class interface for AI-driven systems. This includes defining standards for: 

API descriptions optimized for agents 

Schema consistency and semantic modeling  

Tool and service discoverability  

API documentation optimized for agent consumption  

You will establish best practices for documentation-as-code, ensuring APIs are designed for both developers and AI systems. 

Context Management & Runtime Patterns 

You will define patterns for context-aware APIs and services, including: 

Context management and retrieval 

Context caching  

Session and state management  

Memory-aware service interactions  

You will help design scalable context-aware systems leveraging technologies such as Vertex AI Context Caching and related frameworks. 

Key Responsibilities:

• Partner closely 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  

Required Qualifications:

• 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 preferred)  
• Experience building developer platforms or service-oriented architectures  
• Strong system design and architectural thinking skills 
• Proven ability to lead cross-team technical initiatives  

Preferred Qualifications:

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 like 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 

What Success Looks Like:

30 Days 

Assess current API and platform architecture 

Define API and MCP platform strategy  

Identify early opportunities for standardization  

60 Days 

Deliver initial platform frameworks and standards 

Begin rollout of semantic API patterns  

Establish MCP integration approach  

90 Days 

Agent-ready APIs in production 

MCP-enabled services deployed

Clear platform standards adopted across teams

Measurable improvement in API consistency and developer velocity