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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Integration Lead

💰 $110,000 - $160,000

EngineeringIntegrationITArchitectureLeadership

🎯 Role Definition

The Integration Lead is a senior technical and people leader who owns the end‑to‑end integration strategy, architecture, delivery and operational readiness for cross‑functional programs. This role leads design and implementation of APIs, message-based architectures, ETL and middleware solutions across cloud and on‑prem systems, enforces integration governance and patterns, mentors engineers, and coordinates closely with product, infrastructure, security and operations teams to ensure integrations are scalable, secure, observable and aligned to business SLAs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Integration Developer, Enterprise Integration Engineer, or Middleware Engineer with hands‑on experience across API and messaging platforms.
  • Solutions Architect or Senior Systems Engineer who has owned integration designs and platform delivery.
  • Technical Project Lead or Senior Backend Engineer with experience delivering cross‑system integrations.

Advancement To:

  • Head of Integration / Integration Architect Lead responsible for integration strategy across the enterprise.
  • Director of Platform Engineering or Director of Integration & APIs overseeing multiple integration squads.
  • Enterprise Architect or VP of Engineering with responsibility for API and integration platforms.

Lateral Moves:

  • API Product Manager leading API strategy and lifecycle management.
  • Technical Program Manager coordinating large cross‑functional integration programs.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own the end‑to‑end integration architecture for assigned domains, creating and maintaining integration blueprints, reference architectures, design patterns and reusable components that accelerate delivery and reduce operational risk.
  • Lead technical discovery and solution design sessions with product, business and engineering stakeholders to translate business requirements into secure, scalable integration solutions, including API contracts, data mappings, and event schemas.
  • Architect and implement API-first integration strategies, defining API gateway policies, OpenAPI/Swagger specifications, versioning strategies, and developer portal requirements to support internal and external consumers.
  • Evaluate, select and operationalize integration middleware and iPaaS platforms (for example MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, TIBCO, IBM App Connect, or Apache Camel), documenting tradeoffs and migration strategies from legacy point‑to‑point integrations.
  • Design and implement event-driven architectures and streaming solutions using Kafka, AWS Kinesis or equivalent, including topic design, retention policies, consumer groups, and backpressure strategies to support high throughput use cases.
  • Lead implementation of secure integration patterns including OAuth2 / OIDC, SAML, mutual TLS, API keys, and fine‑grained access controls; collaborate with IAM and security teams to enforce token management, secrets handling and audit requirements.
  • Define and enforce integration governance, standards and best practices including naming conventions, contract testing, schema evolution policies, SLAs, error handling, retries, idempotency and observability requirements.
  • Drive CI/CD pipelines for integration artefacts (APIs, connectors, integration flows, container images) using Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, and ensure automated testing, linting and deployment to multiple environments.
  • Mentor and lead cross‑functional integration teams, providing technical guidance, code reviews, design authority, and career development to build a high‑performing integration capability.
  • Manage delivery plans, sprint priorities and dependent workstreams in collaboration with product owners and program managers, ensuring timely delivery of integration milestones and risk mitigation.
  • Design and govern data transformation and mapping processes, including complex ETL/ELT flows, canonical data models, and data quality rules to ensure accurate, consistent exchange across systems.
  • Collaborate with cloud platform and infrastructure teams to design resilient, scalable deployment topologies for integration components including containers (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), serverless functions (AWS Lambda/Azure Functions) and platform automation (Terraform).
  • Implement monitoring, logging and observability for integrations using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk or Datadog to provide operational dashboards, alerting and incident playbooks.
  • Lead troubleshooting and root cause analysis for production incidents across integration pathways, coordinating cross‑team response and post‑mortems to drive permanent fixes and reliability improvements.
  • Partner with vendor and professional services teams when procuring or extending commercial integration platforms, driving POCs, license planning and SLA definitions.
  • Establish contract testing and consumer‑driven contract workflows (eg. Pact, Postman monitors) to validate integration compatibility and prevent breaking changes across dependent services.
  • Drive backward/forward compatibility strategies for APIs and events, including semantic versioning, deprecation plans and migration guides to minimize consumer impact.
  • Optimize performance and cost for integration solutions by profiling throughput, tuning message batches, compression, caching strategies and selecting appropriate service tiers in cloud environments.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory, security and privacy requirements for data in motion and at rest, collaborating with legal and compliance teams to implement data masking, encryption and retention controls.
  • Build and maintain an integration backlog, capacity plan and technical roadmap that aligns with enterprise strategy and continuously improves platform maturity and developer experience.
  • Coach development teams on integration best practices, provide reusable templates and starter kits for common patterns, and run brown‑bag sessions or integration guild meetings to spread knowledge.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Provide architecture review and guidance for third‑party SaaS integrations and partner onboarding.
  • Assist procurement and vendor management with integration licensing, support contracts and renewal planning.
  • Contribute to policy documentation and runbooks for on‑call rotations and incident escalation related to integration systems.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Enterprise integration architecture and design: API design (REST/GraphQL), event-driven patterns, message brokering, ESB/iPaaS strategies and canonical data modelling.
  • Hands‑on experience with integration platforms such as MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, TIBCO, IBM App Connect, Apache Camel, Spring Integration or equivalent.
  • Strong knowledge of event streaming platforms and message queues: Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS Kinesis, ActiveMQ.
  • API management and gateway experience: Apigee, Kong, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management or native gateway patterns.
  • Proficiency with API specification and contract tools: OpenAPI/Swagger, JSON Schema, GraphQL schema design, and contract testing frameworks (Pact).
  • Cloud integration patterns and services across AWS, Azure or GCP (Lambda, Step Functions, Azure Logic Apps, Event Grid), and experience deploying integrations into cloud native environments.
  • Authentication and authorization standards including OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, JWT, and familiarity with enterprise IAM systems (Okta, Azure AD).
  • Strong scripting and programming skills in Java, Node.js, Python, or similar languages used for integration microservices and connectors.
  • Experience with CI/CD and DevOps toolchains (Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions), containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
  • Data transformation and ETL skills: SQL, ELT frameworks, data mapping, schema migrations and performance tuning for large data flows.
  • Observability and monitoring: familiarity with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk, Datadog and instrumentation best practices.
  • Infrastructure as Code and automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates or equivalent.
  • Security and compliance knowledge for data in transit and at rest, encryption, key management and secure design reviews.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management and ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions while balancing scope, schedule and risk.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills for presenting architecture, roadmaps, executive summaries and technical decisions to mixed audiences.
  • Leadership and mentorship mindset: ability to build teams, coach peers, lead design reviews and create a culture of quality and continuous improvement.
  • Strategic thinking and roadmap planning with a focus on long‑term platform scalability and cost efficiency.
  • Problem solving and analytical skills to diagnose complex integration failures and implement practical, durable fixes.
  • Prioritization and decision making in ambiguous, fast‑moving environments with multiple competing priorities.
  • Collaboration and cross‑functional teamwork with product, security, operations, QA and vendor partners.
  • Customer‑centric mindset: proactively gather feedback from API and integration consumers to improve developer experience and documentation.
  • Adaptability and learning orientation to keep pace with new integration technologies and cloud service improvements.
  • Facilitation skills to run workshops, architecture boards, and integration guilds.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or MBA with strong technical background and leadership experience.
  • Professional certifications such as MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect, or relevant vendor certifications are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical or Systems Engineering
  • Business Information Systems / IT Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 6+ years of hands‑on integration development and architecture, with 3+ years in a leadership or technical lead role.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years of progressive experience delivering enterprise integrations across cloud and on‑prem systems, including experience with iPaaS/ESB platforms, event streaming (Kafka), API management, security protocols, CI/CD and production operations.
  • Proven track record of leading cross‑functional teams, driving integration governance, and delivering high‑availability, secure integration platforms for large organizations.
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