First Abu Dhabi Bank
Senior Lead – API Governance & Product Management
- Permanent
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Experience 15 - 20 yrs
Job expiry date: 19/10/2025
Job overview
Date posted
04/09/2025
Location
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Salary
AED 40,000 - 50,000 per month
Compensation
Comprehensive package + relocation
Experience
15 - 20 yrs
Seniority
Senior & Lead
Qualification
Bachelors degree
Expiration date
19/10/2025
Job description
The Senior Lead – API Governance & Product Management at First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) is responsible for defining and implementing a comprehensive API governance framework that ensures consistency, security, and scalability across all value streams. This role drives the API technical product strategy to support digital transformation, platform enablement, and ecosystem integration while fostering an API-first mindset that promotes modularity, reusability, and agility. The position aligns API initiatives with enterprise architecture and data strategy and manages the full API product lifecycle—from ideation to retirement. The incumbent will lead API onboarding processes, maintain governance policies, manage the API catalog and developer portal, and facilitate design reviews. Key duties include enforcing documentation standards, driving API innovation, monitoring performance, and supporting compliance with regulatory frameworks like Open Banking, GDPR, PSD2, and HIPAA. The role also involves cross-functional leadership, incident support, budget planning, and enablement of development teams in best practices. Expertise in tools such as API Management, Kong, Cloud Native Services, and Kubernetes is required, along with a deep understanding of protocols like REST, GraphQL, and gRPC.
Required skills
Key responsibilities
- Define and implement a comprehensive API governance framework ensuring consistency, security, and scalability
- Drive the API technical product strategy to support digital transformation, platform enablement, and ecosystem integration
- Foster an API-first mindset across streams to promote modularity, reusability, and agility
- Ensure APIs are designed and managed as strategic digital assets delivering measurable business value
- Align API initiatives with enterprise architecture, data strategy, and reuse goals
- Establish metrics and KPIs to measure API performance, adoption, and business impact
- Lead the API onboarding process for internal and external consumers through technical product owners
- Develop and maintain API governance policies, including naming conventions, documentation standards, and security protocols
- Own the API product lifecycle from ideation to retirement
- Manage the API catalog and developer portal for discoverability and usability
- Monitor and report on API performance, adoption, and ROI to leadership
- Facilitate API design reviews ensuring compliance with governance and architectural standards
- Drive API innovation including AI-powered APIs and event-driven architectures
- Promote API reuse and standardization across business units
- Ensure API security and compliance through audits, threat modeling, and policy enforcement
- Lead cross-functional working groups to align API strategy with enterprise goals
- Maintain and enforce API documentation standards
- Support incident management and troubleshooting of API-related issues
- Contribute to budget planning and resource allocation for API engineering
- Provide training and enablement to development teams on API best practices
Experience & skills
- Possess 15+ years of overall experience, with at least 10 years in banking
- Demonstrate ability to translate business needs into API capabilities
- Have expertise in API protocols including REST, GraphQL, and gRPC
- Be proficient with API gateways and service mesh
- Show strong grasp of API lifecycle governance, versioning, and deprecation policies
- Be familiar with regulatory frameworks like Open Banking, GDPR, PSD2, and HIPAA
- Have ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence without authority
- Exhibit strong communication and evangelism skills for promoting API adoption
- Demonstrate proficiency in API analytics, usage tracking, and performance optimization
- Have experience with API Management tools, Kong, Cloud Native Services, and Kubernetes
