Job Postings Provide View Into Internal API Efforts

The API space has been pretty easy to monitor until recently, with most API efforts being public, but lately everything is trending is towards internal APIs, making it a lot harder to track on what some companies are up.

I’m always on the hunt for new signals I can use to track on what companies are up to when it comes to their API strategy. A signal I’ve been using for a while, but is an increasingly important part of my monitoring, is the job posting for API architect, developer and evangelists.

An example of this is the posting for an API platform engineer from video collaboration platform BlueJeans. We know that BlueJeans gets APIs when it comes to integration, but there isn’t much public discussion about their internal API initiatives or any publicly available developer program.

According to the job posting BlueJeans is looking for a developer to help in, "building and scaling the API platform of our cloud application". It is pretty clear that APIs is what make the video collaboration platform operate, and I will add BlueJeans to my list of companies using APIs, just not into showcasing it publicly.

In the future, job postings will be just one of many signals we use to understand how companies are using Apis. I’ll do what I can to get companies to share stories publicly about their APIs, but in some cases I don’t think that companies are ready, and not used to talking about their operations in this way.