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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Integration Inspector

💰 $70,000 - $130,000

ITQuality AssuranceIntegrationDevOpsMiddleware

🎯 Role Definition

The Integration Inspector validates end-to-end integrations across internal systems and third-party partners to ensure data integrity, security, performance and compliance. This role designs and executes integration test strategies, reviews API and EDI contracts, investigates production incidents, and drives continuous improvement of integration quality through automation, monitoring and partnership with engineering and business teams. The position balances hands-on technical diagnostics with clear communication to product owners, vendors, and release teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Integration Tester / QA Tester – API & EDI
  • Systems Analyst with focus on interfaces and middleware
  • Junior Integration Engineer or Support Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Lead Integration Inspector / Integration Lead
  • Integration Architect / Middleware Architect
  • Senior QA Manager, Release Manager, or Head of Integration Quality

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) focused on integration reliability
  • Release Manager or Change Control Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, document and execute comprehensive integration test plans and test cases (functional, regression, end-to-end, negative, and data validation) for REST/SOAP APIs, message queues, batch feeds and EDI pipelines to ensure correct behavior and data integrity across systems.
  • Validate API contracts using OpenAPI/Swagger and contract testing tools; verify request/response schemas, headers, status codes and error handling to confirm conformance with service-level agreements and consumer expectations.
  • Inspect and validate EDI transactions (X12, EDIFACT) and perform mapping verification, envelope/header validation, ISA/GS level checks, and partner-specific compliance checks to prevent downstream processing failures.
  • Perform end-to-end data mapping inspections to ensure field-level transformations, format conversions, and business rule applications are accurate between source and target systems.
  • Execute automated integration test suites using frameworks and tools (Postman, SoapUI, Newman, pytest, REST-assured) and maintain CI/CD pipelines to run integration tests as part of build and release processes.
  • Proactively monitor integration health in production using logs, metrics and APM tools (Splunk, Datadog, New Relic), identify anomalies, and triage incidents to minimize customer and business impact.
  • Lead root cause analysis for integration incidents, produce RCA reports, and coordinate remediation plans with development, operations and vendor teams until full resolution and preventive measures are implemented.
  • Validate authentication and authorization flows for integrations, including OAuth2, API keys, JWT, SAML and mutual TLS, ensuring secure and auditable access between systems.
  • Perform performance and load testing on integration endpoints and middleware components to identify bottlenecks, inform capacity planning and validate non-functional SLAs.
  • Review and verify middleware configurations (MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Tibco, IBM Integration Bus) and message broker setups (Kafka, RabbitMQ) to ensure correct routing, retry strategies, dead-letter handling and idempotency.
  • Maintain and operate integration testing environments, ensure test data management (masking, synthetic data, refresh procedures) and coordinate environment provisioning to support reliable testing cycles.
  • Manage defect lifecycle for integration-related issues: reproduce issues, create clear defect reports, prioritize with product and engineering teams, and verify fixes in subsequent test runs.
  • Collaborate with product owners and business analysts to translate functional requirements into integration test acceptance criteria and ensure traceability between requirements, test cases and results.
  • Conduct pre-release smoke checks and post-deployment verification for all integrations in scheduled releases, including partner cutovers and migration activities.
  • Create, maintain and evolve runbooks, test scripts, monitoring playbooks and standard operating procedures for onboarding new partners and integrating third-party systems.
  • Develop and maintain dashboards and KPI reports for integration quality (error rates, latency, throughput, mean time to detect/resolve), communicating trends and risks to stakeholders.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives to reduce integration defects and cycle time by proposing automation opportunities, standardizing contracts, and promoting reuse of integration templates.
  • Coordinate and perform acceptance testing with external partners and vendors, validate partner certifications, and manage onboarding checklists to ensure seamless production readiness.
  • Ensure integrations comply with regulatory, data privacy and security frameworks (GDPR, HIPAA where applicable), perform data lineage checks, and assist internal audit requests related to interfaces.
  • Mentor junior QA and support staff on integration testing best practices, debugging techniques, partner management, and interpretation of technical logs and traces.
  • Review change requests and configuration changes for integrations, assess risk to downstream systems, and participate in change advisory board (CAB) reviews as required.
  • Maintain an up-to-date knowledge base of common integration failure modes, remediation steps and vendor-specific quirks to speed incident resolution.
  • Facilitate cross-functional workshops (development, product, BizOps, security) to align on integration design, error handling patterns, contract versioning and rollback policies.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to help business teams validate integration outputs and support decision-making.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by providing input on integration reliability, data quality gaps, and architecture improvement opportunities.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements and acceptance criteria for new interfaces and API initiatives.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering and integration teams to align testing priorities and technical debt remediation.
  • Assist vendor management by evaluating third-party integration quality, coordinating fixes, and maintaining partner SLAs and onboarding documentation.
  • Provide training sessions and demos for internal stakeholders on integration behavior, monitoring tools, and how to interpret integration health metrics.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep experience testing and validating RESTful and SOAP-based APIs, including familiarity with OpenAPI/Swagger, WSDL and contract-driven testing techniques.
  • Strong knowledge of EDI standards and tools: X12, EDIFACT, AS2/AS4 protocols, trading partner setup and EDI mapping verification.
  • Proficiency with integration platforms and middleware such as MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Tibco, IBM Integration Bus, or similar ESB/iPaaS solutions.
  • Hands-on experience with message brokers and streaming platforms (Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS) and understanding of at-least-once vs. exactly-once semantics.
  • Skilled in test automation for integrations using tools like Postman, SoapUI, Newman, pytest, REST-assured or custom automation harnesses; comfortable scripting in Python, JavaScript, or Java.
  • Strong SQL skills for validating records, data reconciliation, complex joins and troubleshooting data issues across relational databases.
  • Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI), Git version control and automated test orchestration as part of release workflows.
  • Experience with monitoring, logging and observability tools (Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, ELK stack) for proactive monitoring and incident investigation.
  • Understanding of security protocols for integrations: OAuth2, JWT, TLS, SAML, API gateway features, and secure credential handling.
  • Capability to perform performance and load testing for integration endpoints using JMeter, Gatling or similar tools, and interpret results for scalability planning.
  • Knowledge of data governance concepts, data masking, PII handling and regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA) as they relate to interface design and testing.
  • Experience working with JSON Schema, XML schema validation, transformation languages (XSLT) and data mapping tools.
  • Comfortable reading and interpreting log traces, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and correlating trace IDs across services for troubleshooting.
  • Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and their integration services (API Gateway, Lambda, EventBridge) is a plus.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional attention to detail with the ability to spot subtle data and contract mismatches that can lead to production incidents.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills to explain technical issues to non-technical stakeholders and to document findings clearly.
  • Analytical problem-solving mindset with a structured approach to triage, reproduce and resolve integration issues.
  • Effective stakeholder management and negotiation skills when coordinating fixes with engineering teams and external partners.
  • Ability to prioritize work in a fast-paced environment, manage multiple concurrent integration issues and meet release deadlines.
  • Collaborative team player who proactively shares knowledge, mentors juniors, and promotes best practices across teams.
  • Customer-focused attitude with an emphasis on minimizing business disruption and continuously improving the partner experience.
  • Adaptability to evolving architectures, third-party changes, and shifting regulatory requirements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent relevant work experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in a related discipline or relevant professional certifications (MuleSoft Developer/Integration Architect, Boomi Professional, ISTQB, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer).
  • Certifications in cloud platforms (AWS Certified Developer/Architect, Azure Developer/Architect) or security (CSA, CISSP basics) are advantageous.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Software Engineering
  • Data Engineering
  • Information Security

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of combined experience in integration testing, middleware, API validation, or systems integration roles. (Senior roles commonly require 5+ years.)

Preferred: Demonstrated experience with enterprise-level integrations, multiple vendor platforms, or production incident leadership; prior exposure to EDI onboarding, trading partner management, and regulatory/compliance environments preferred.

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