Senior Manager, API and Middleware Engineering

Heidrick & Struggles is the world’s foremost advisor on executive leadership, driving superior client performance through premier human capital leadership advisory services. For more than 70 years, we’ve delivered value for our clients by leveraging unrivaled expertise to help organizations discover and enable outstanding leaders and teams. Learn more at

Heidrick & Struggles is a premier provider of global leadership advisory and on-demand talent solutions, serving the senior-level talent and consulting needs of the world's top organizations. In our role as trusted leadership advisors, we partner with our clients to develop future-ready leaders and organizations, bringing together our services and offerings in executive search, diversity and inclusion, leadership assessment and development, organization and team acceleration, culture shaping and on-demand, independent talent solutions.

Heidrick & Struggles pioneered the profession of executive search more than 70 years ago. Today, the firm provides integrated talent and human capital solutions to help our clients change the world, one leadership team at a time.

The Senior Manager, API & Middleware Engineering will lead API and middleware engineering as a strategic enterprise platform capability supporting Mule Soft development, enterprise integrations, API‑managed services, reusable connectivity patterns, AI‑enabled services, and emerging agent/MCP integration frameworks. This role owns the delivery, operational maturity, reliability, scalability, and engineering effectiveness of the enterprise middleware platform, enabling secure and reusable connectivity across core enterprise systems, data platforms, APIs, and AI‑enabled workflows.

The role partners with Enterprise Architecture and engineering teams to operationalize practical, enablement‑based governance that improves consistency without creating delivery bottlenecks. This position manages a blended team of internal employees, external contractors, and vendor partners, while owning middleware delivery, API standards, integration support, backlog management, technical governance, and production readiness. The Senior Manager partners across Application and Platform Engineering, Application Platform Services, Quality Engineering, Architecture, Security, Data, AI, Infrastructure, Product, PMO, and vendor teams.

This role operates as a player‑coach leader, balancing strategic platform ownership, team leadership, operational accountability, and hands‑on technical engagement across middleware and enterprise integration initiatives.

• Lead Mule Soft engineering delivery, middleware support, integration design, API implementation, and production troubleshooting across enterprise integration initiatives.
• Own the middleware platform operating model, delivery governance, engineering standards, technical backlog, sprint capacity, run/change balance, and operational maturity.
• Provide hands‑on technical leadership and serve as a senior escalation point for solution design, design reviews, implementation oversight, troubleshooting, and support for complex enterprise integrations.
• Partner with Product Owners, PMO, Enterprise Architecture, Security, Data, AI, Infrastructure, Quality Engineering, Dev Ops, and application teams to align priorities, dependencies, risks, roadmap milestones, standards, and delivery execution.
• Lead a blended team of internal employees, contractors, and vendor partners, including work allocation, coaching, performance oversight, vendor coordination, delivery quality, and accountability against middleware engineering priorities.
• Define, implement, and evolve reusable integration patterns, shared services, API standards,…