I'm Samir, an independent principal API consultant and API management expert. I help organizations and companies to level up their API practice and build API products faster.
Over the past decade, I have had the privilege of assisting renowned organizations such as Postman, AsyncAPI, Goodbarber, Dailymotion, Adidas, and Back Market in transforming their API visions into robust and efficient API platforms. By focusing on people, technologies, and governance, I have successfully guided these organizations towards achieving their API strategy.
PROJECTS
AsyncAPI / Postman
- Coordinated AsyncAPI integration MVP, resulting in enhanced AsyncAPI capabilities adoption in the Postman app
- Managing and mentoring 10 open-source full-time maintainers, leading to increased contributor satisfaction
- Supporting the global AsyncAPI initiative vision and coaching maintainers in setting up their roadmap
- Maintaining AsyncAPI CLI and Studio projects
- Created developer experience working group
BackMarket
- Created API Vision / Strategy, resulting in a cohesive and advanced API framework for the organization
- Led Global API initiatives: API First, API Consumer-Centric, and API as a product
- Led API gateway migration effort from NGinx to Kong, overseeing the complete transition process including operating model
- Created API champion role in ~40 product teams, fostering API expertise and scaling API practice across teams
- Hired and built an API enablement team, ensuring effective implementation of API strategy
- Created API Guidelines, API Catalog, API Portal, and custom API tooling, leading to consistent and easy-to-use APIs
- Inspiring & coaching ~200 engineers to improve API practice, resulting in enhanced API quality
- Enhanced API discovery KPIs: The percentage of engineers finding APIs in less than five minutes increased from 15% to 50%
- Enhanced API consumer Net Promoter Score (NPS) from -15 to +10
Adidas
- Coordinated API and integration capabilities API product teams (20 teams)
- Transformed API governance from a centralized model to a decentralized model
- Led API platform migration from Tibco Mashery to Kong, resulting in $1.5 Million/year savings
- Coordinated API training for API as a product for 20 product owners
- Maintained a decentralized API management platform as a self-service (Kong Ingress, GitOps, Kubernetes, AWS)
- Led API governance & API guidelines for the entire enterprise, and coached hundreds of engineers on how to use API platforms / tooling in production
- Define API design and development guidelines and patterns, align them with domain and solution architects, and enforce them in the API developer’s community
Dailymotion
- Led the API Platform (15 billion API calls per month, ~ 100ms RT)
- Managed the developer community through regular participation at hackathons and developer forums
- Developed and built Developer Hub
- Managed the entire Dailymotion API lifecycle
Goodbarber
- Built Goodbarber internal and public API
- Built core features (Authorization, Video HLS encoding service, Native Code App generator …)
- Maintained and scaled the infrastructure
WMaker
- Developed and maintained core services (API, Auth, Content engine, Video encoding …)
- Provided support for customers, and delivered effective demos and presentations to customers
- Designed Plugin & API architecture end-to-end that unlocked code CMS capabilities and increased product value
- Developed product Internalization capability enabling MENA, and APAC customers to use the Content Management System (CMS)
- Maintained hybrid (on-prem/cloud OVH+AWS) infrastructure (MySQL, PostgreSQL, HAProxy, Varnish, FFmeg)