Senior API Data Analyst

impact.com · Cape Town

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About impact.com

impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com:

The API Analyst keeps a company-wide picture of how our APIs are used, what they cost, and where integrations go wrong, and turns that picture into a weekly operating loop. You work where the public API meets the systems behind it. The teams that own each API own its behaviour, its caching, and how large a customer's limit should be.

Gateway and platform engineers own how those limits are enforced. This role supplies the evidence, the automation, and the weekly pressure those decisions need. You do not take over another team's product to make the change.

Day to day you live in request logs, latency and row-volume signals, rate-limit behaviour, and partner usage patterns. You automate the checks that turn a one-off investigation into a continuous view of API health. Each week you work that view: catch misuse and bad integration patterns, name APIs that should be retired or capped, triage alerts, and hand the owning team a record they can act on.

When a problem sits in one integration, you help shape a proportionate response so the platform stays stable and everyone else's access stays usable. You also help say what good looks like for customers. The same usage record should drive the story we tell integrators: which patterns we support, which ones we will not, and what we expect under contract.

You are technical enough to build those checks yourself and to read the relevant code with the team that owns a change. You are senior enough to take a hard finding to the front and keep the response the size of the problem.

What You'll Do:

 1. Run API usage as an operating loop

• Build a continuous picture of how our APIs are actually used: who is calling what, at what volume, with which date ranges, paging patterns, concurrency, and how widely a single integrator's traffic is spread.
• Detect and explain fan-out risk: traffic that looks fine for one account but becomes a platform incident when a partner spreads load across many accounts at once.
• Each week, work the API usage record. Identify misuse, bad integrations, spikes, and APIs that should be retired or capped. Triage the alerts. Keep a living history so the next incident starts from evidence.
• Separate expensive work from cheap work: understand when a long-running call was waiting in a queue versus actually heavy, and when a wide date range costs more or less than many narrow ones.
• Hand the owning teams the metrics they use to choose caching, rate-limit sizes, date-range caps, and concurrency. Stay with them until the evidence is understood. The decision stays with the team that owns the API.

2. Turn observability into evidence for guardrails

• Automate analysis across log search, data warehouses, and reporting tools: recurring checks, red flags, and briefings that surface bad patterns early, including with AI-assisted triage where it earns its keep. Building those checks is the job.
• Propose concrete limits grounded in real usage plus room to grow: short bursts, sustained rates, and a ceiling across an integrator's full footprint. Pressure-test the proposal with the team that owns the API and with the gateway team.
• Partner with gateway and platform engineers on how rate limits, access tokens, and HTTP 429 responses enforce the limits those teams have set.
• Recommend patterns such as date-range caps, concurrency limits, synchronous versus asynchronous versus streaming delivery, and limited-scope credentials. Follow the evidence through with the owning team. They make the product change.

3. Raise the bar on integration patterns and the customer story

• Study how large partners and peers integrate, including synchronous, asynchronous, streaming, and bulk export, and how they cap concurrency. Bring clear recommendations back into our API offering.
• Work with partnership and product colleagues on strategic and enterprise partners so proposals for rates, spare capacity, and migration reflect platform cost and risk as well as the commercial goal. Partnership owns the commercial terms. You own the cost and misuse evidence those terms have to survive.
• Help define what good looks like for third-party integrators, so we can set expectations in the contract and so what we tell customers matches what the platform can support.
• Turn what we learn from early partners into playbooks for the next integrator: clearer categories, clearer ceilings, better documentation, cleaner onboarding.

4. Hold one company-level view

• Connect what the teams that build APIs, analyse usage, and run the gateway each see into one company-level view of API health.
• Hold the tension between protecting the platform and letting customers run their businesses on our APIs.
• Favour a targeted fix, such as narrower access, a ceiling for one partner, or a guardrail on one API, when a problem is concentrated in one integration, so the wider API stays usable.
• Champion changes that improve both platform health and the client experience, including an outdated delivery pattern, an overly open API, or documentation that teaches a bad pattern. The team that owns the API makes the product change.
• Apply the same observability to newer API surfaces, including APIs built for automated clients, where traffic concentrates through one entry point and still needs a clear picture per capability, per user, and per account. You bring the picture. The team that owns that API decides the policy.

Essential requirements

• Senior analytical profile. Several years in a role that mixes data analysis, platform or API observability, and operational triage. This is not a graduate or first-job role. You need to reason about what a paging pattern or a wide date range means for the systems behind the API.
• Observability and log analysis. Comfort living in request logs and metrics (for example Elasticsearch, BigQuery, or a similar stack), joining latency, row counts, paging, date ranges, and multi-account fan-out into a coherent story.
• Statistics and quantitative judgement. Enough statistics and maths to turn months of usage into rate proposals, spare capacity, and defensible ceilings, and to know when the model is wrong.
• Automation and engineering depth. You build the repeatable checks yourself (Python, SQL, or similar), including AI-assisted triage where it earns its keep. You can read the code around an API and partner with the engineers who own it on a concrete change. You are not hired to own those API implementations.
• A weekly operating habit. You have run a cadence where analysis produced real changes: misuse contained, an API retired or capped, a team given numbers they acted on. A report that nobody uses is not the job.
• API and integration literacy. Strong understanding of REST APIs, rate limiting, authentication, concurrency, and common integration anti-patterns such as wide fan-out, unbounded date ranges, and unbounded replay.
• Judgement. You take hard findings to the forefront, argue for the right guardrail, and keep the response proportionate. You can work across the teams that own the APIs and the gateway without becoming the owner of their product.
• Clear communication. You can explain a spike, a rate table, or a proposed ceiling to engineers, product, and partnership colleagues in plain language backed by evidence, and you can turn that into the story we tell customers about a good integration.

Nice-to-have requirements

1. Hands-on experience with API gateways, rate-limit buckets, and token scoping.
2. Familiarity with warehouses and analytical tools used for traffic analytics (for example BigQuery, Looker, or a similar stack).
3. Experience supporting large business-to-business or partner API programmes, including enterprise rate tiers and contractual usage limits.
4. Exposure to query-cost or resource-based measures of API work, used to explain platform cost and spare capacity.
5. Interest in APIs built for automated clients, and how the same misuse patterns show up there.

Benefits and Perks:

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses

impact.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.

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