Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Integration Developer

🎯 Role Definition

An Integration Developer is a technical specialist responsible for designing, developing, implementing and supporting integration and data‑flow solutions that connect disparate systems, APIs, applications and services across the enterprise. This role focuses on enabling seamless communication between business applications, orchestrating data exchanges, ensuring reliability and performance of integration layers, and collaborating with stakeholders, architects, developers and operations to deliver scalable, maintainable integration platforms.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Junior Integration or Middleware Developer
Back‑end Developer specialising in APIs and data services
Data Integration Engineer or ETL Developer

Advancement To:

Senior Integration Developer / Integration Architect
Lead Middleware Engineer or Enterprise Integration Architect
Director of Integration Services, Head of API/Integration Platform

Lateral Moves:

API/Platform Engineer (focusing on services)
DevOps Engineer with integration focus
Cloud Integration Specialist (iPaaS, hybrid environments)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Design, develop and maintain integration solutions using middleware, enterprise service bus (ESB), API management platforms or iPaaS technologies to connect applications, data, services and partners.
Collaborate with business analysts, architects and stakeholders to gather, analyse and translate requirements into technical integration designs, interface specifications and data‑flow diagrams.
Create and manage data mappings, transforms, filters and routing logic between source systems and target systems to ensure data consistency, accuracy and performance.
Develop RESTful and SOAP web services, message‑oriented middleware, queue or event‑based integrations and API endpoints to support internal and external system interactions.
Implement, test and deploy batch, real‑time and near‑real‑time integration solutions, ensuring seamless data movement and minimal latency across systems.
Monitor integration processes, identify errors or failures, perform root‑cause analysis, and implement corrective actions to stabilise production integrations.
Tune integration system performance including throughput, reliability, error‑handling, retries, buffer sizing, resource allocation and monitoring of service levels.
Maintain technical documentation including integration architecture diagrams, interface specifications, error‑handling procedures and support run‑books.
Ensure adherence to integration standards, governance practices, interface naming conventions, version control, deployment pipelines and environment promotion workflows.
Participate in agile ceremonies (sprint planning, stand‐ups, backlog grooming, retrospectives) to deliver integration features iteratively and maintain alignment with project timelines.
Provide production support, including on‐call shifts for critical integrations, managing incident response and collaborating with infrastructure and operations teams.
Mentor junior integration developers, conduct code reviews, share best practices in integration design and build, and contribute to continuous improvement of the team’s capability.
Evaluate and adopt new integration technologies, middleware products, cloud integration services or patterns to improve reliability, scalability and reduce technical debt.
Manage data and system migrations, cut‑over plans, API versioning, legacy system integrations and ensure minimal disruption to business processes.
Build and maintain frameworks for reusable integration components, connectors, templates and patterns to accelerate delivery and standardise interface development.
Work with data architects and database teams to design data models, schemas, data‑flows and ensure that integrations align with data‑warehouse or analytics initiatives.
Implement security, compliance and data protection measures in integrations: ensure encryption, authentication/authorization, data masking and audit logging where necessary.
Track integration metrics such as latency, error rates, throughput, resource usage and generate reports/insights for management and continuous improvement.
Collaborate with cloud/infrastructure teams to deploy integration solutions into hybrid or multi‑cloud environments, utilising serverless, containerised or micro‑services patterns where applicable.
Ensure integration solutions support business continuity: implement failover, redundancies, disaster recovery plans and assess impacts of system changes or upgrades.
Provide support and collaboration with external partners or vendors to ensure third‑party system integrations meet SLAs, data contracts and error‑handling expectations.

Secondary Functions

Support ad‑hoc data extraction, migration or transformation tasks for stakeholders, analytics teams or data warehousing projects.
Contribute to the organisation’s integration architecture roadmap and strategy: propose platform enhancements, tool upgrades or standardisation initiatives.
Collaborate with business units to translate emerging integration requirements (e.g., SaaS onboarding, B2B APIs) into engineering deliverables.
Participate in planning, review and retrospective sessions to continuously refine integration practices and improve delivery quality.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proficiency in integration technologies such as MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Apache Camel, IBM Integration Bus (IIB), TIBCO or similar platforms.
Strong skills in programming languages (Java, C#, Python or similar) for building, automating and supporting integrations.
Expertise in RESTful and SOAP web services, API gateway technologies, micro‑services and event‑driven architectures.
Solid SQL and relational database experience (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, DB2) along with data mapping and transformation logic.
Experience with message/queue middleware (JMS, RabbitMQ, Kafka), file transfers, ETL tools and real‑time integration flows.
Cloud integration knowledge: Azure Integration Services, AWS Lambda, API Management, Service Bus or similar in multi‑cloud/hybrid environments.
Familiarity with data modelling, data governance, data quality, metadata, and integration standards.
Experience with version control (Git, SVN), CI/CD, environment promotion, build/deploy pipelines, and release management for integration artefacts.
Troubleshooting and monitoring skills: able to identify, debug and optimise integration job failures, performance bottlenecks or data flow issues.
Writing thorough technical documentation including interface specs, mapping documentation, change logs and support run‑books.

Soft Skills

Excellent analytical and problem‑solving mindset: able to dissect integration challenges and propose robust solutions.
Strong communication and collaboration skills: able to work with business, architects, development and operations teams effectively.
Ability to mentor, coach and lead junior team members, promoting best practices and continuous improvement.
Business awareness: able to understand business processes, service‑level requirements and translate them into technical integration solutions.
Time‑management and prioritisation: able to manage multiple projects, deadlines and support responsibilities concurrently.
Attention to detail: ensure integrations are reliable, well‑documented and meet quality standards.
Adaptability and continuous learning: comfortable with evolving technologies, platforms and integration patterns.
Ownership and accountability: takes end‑to‑end responsibility for integration deliverables from development to support.
Stakeholder management: able to engage with third‑party vendors, architects and clients to align on requirements and deliverables.
Resilience under pressure: able to provide escalation support for production issues and maintain uptime for mission‑critical integrations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree or relevant certification in integration platforms (e.g., MuleSoft Certified Developer, Dell Boomi Developer) or cloud integration services.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Information Systems
Systems Integration / Middleware

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3‑5 years of hands‑on integration development experience, working with APIs, middleware, queues, real‑time data flows and system‑to‑system integration.

Preferred:

5+ years of enterprise experience designing and implementing complex integrations in large-scale environments, including cloud/hybrid platforms, mentoring others and contributing to integration architecture strategy.