Nicholas Rich

Lead Application Development Engineer — American Family Insurance

2023–Present  ·  API Management Team Lead & Apigee Platform Product Owner — Enterprise API Management (EAPIM), Apigee X on GCP/AWS, 300+ proxies, 2B annual requests, federated developer organization

API Program, Governance & Federated Delivery

• Owns the enterprise API program end to end — design standards, lifecycle governance, delivery pipelines, developer onboarding, and portfolio strategy — enabling a federated model where development teams across the enterprise build and deploy their own APIs on shared, governed infrastructure.
• Authored the enterprise API Management operating model (RACI: 88 activities, 8 lifecycle stages, 6 roles), establishing the accountability structure that makes federated delivery work across design, security, platform, and delivery teams.
• Made governance automatic rather than advisory. Built the shared enterprise policy framework (pre/post-proxy flow hooks) applying security, quota enforcement, and traceability across 300+ proxies org-wide, plus a custom governance linter and organization-wide OpenAPI (Spectral) ruleset gated into every CI/CD promotion.
• Designed the platform's delivery backbone — the CI/CD pipeline template system promoting every proxy through dev → preprod → prod with compliance gating on each run — and 33 reusable shared flows (authN/Z, fault handling, logging, CORS) that standardize cross-cutting concerns for every team onboarding.

Agentic AI & AI Gateway

• Delivered MCP proxying into production on Apigee — a governed path for Model Context Protocol traffic through enterprise API management — while leading the evaluation to extend it into full AI gateway capability with authentication, policy enforcement, and audit across all agentic traffic.
• Designed and built the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server behind it (TypeScript, 16 tools), exposing API proxy, product, deployment, and live-debugging operations to AI coding assistants as governed, agent-callable tools.
• Scoping the enterprise's agent governance gap — developers today run local, unmanaged MCP servers with no approved remote pattern. Partnered with platform security on a compliant zero-API-key access path to resolve the authentication constraint blocking approved remote MCP deployment.

Platform Reliability & Technical Leadership

• 100% resolution across 47 high-priority production incidents with zero major outages; led root-cause analysis on a platform-wide gateway outage (504 error storm) and drove the resulting problem-record remediation.
• Architected observability across 42 production APIs (Datadog, ServiceNow CMDB, automated alerting), designed fault-tolerant multi-region architecture with automated failover, and led enterprise SSL certificate migration to Private CAS with zero customer impact.
• Delivered the first org-wide API portfolio reporting capability via an automated Python/BigQuery metadata pipeline, and cut developer onboarding time 40% with a self-service CLI toolchain that shifts governance validation left to the developer's machine.
• Grew the platform engineering team from 2 to 6 through mentorship and hiring; led 17 strategic epics to 82% completion through two leadership changes. Chairs the weekly API management architecture and DevSecOps governance review, and contributes as platform stakeholder to enterprise MuleSoft integration initiatives.

Senior Engineer / API Platform Engineer — American Family Insurance

2016–2023

• Led the enterprise gateway consolidation, migrating 50+ APIs from Layer 7 to Apigee X with zero customer-impacting incidents — the foundation of the current API management platform.
• Led the Layer 7 Gateway v10 upgrade to a 99.99% uptime SLA with automated rollback; remediated Log4j exposure through automated blocking rules and comprehensive gateway logging.
• Implemented Infrastructure as Code with Terraform across GCP and AWS; integrated ThreatX, established OAuth/OKTA authentication patterns, and automated API key and credential management.
• Built enterprise core APIs including claims integrations and MQ interfaces, supporting federated development teams across the full API lifecycle from design through production.

Owner / Web Developer — NR Web Development

2012–2015

• Built and deployed web applications across a range of industries, owning the full lifecycle from requirements to production; administered Linux cloud servers with security hardening, automated patching, and disaster recovery.