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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Integration Manager

💰 $ - $

IntegrationITSystemsProject ManagementMiddlewareDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

The Integration Manager is responsible for designing, delivering, and operating scalable systems integration and API strategies that connect enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, HRIS) and data platforms. This role leads cross-functional teams to implement middleware/iPaaS solutions, manage APIs, enforce integration governance, and ensure secure, performant, and resilient data flows across on-premises and cloud environments. The Integration Manager partners with product owners, architects, security, and third-party vendors to translate business requirements into robust integration architectures and reliable delivery pipelines.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Integration Engineer or Lead Integration Developer
  • Systems Architect or Enterprise Architect (with integration focus)
  • Technical Project Manager / Delivery Manager (in middleware/integration projects)

Advancement To:

  • Director of Integration / Head of Integration
  • Director of Engineering or Director of Architecture
  • VP of Technology / Chief Integration Officer (for large enterprises)

Lateral Moves:

  • API Product Manager
  • Cloud Integration Architect
  • Enterprise Data Integration Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end design, delivery, and operationalization of enterprise integration solutions, including middleware platforms (MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, IBM App Connect), iPaaS, ESB, and API gateways, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and business strategy.
  • Define and enforce integration patterns, API standards, security practices (OAuth2, JWT, TLS), error handling and retry strategies, and design guidance to ensure consistent, maintainable, and secure integrations across teams.
  • Own the integration roadmap and backlog: prioritize integration initiatives, define acceptance criteria, estimate work, and coordinate releases with product owners, engineering, QA, and operations to meet business SLAs.
  • Architect scalable, fault-tolerant integration topologies for hybrid environments (on-prem and cloud), including event-driven architectures, message queuing (Kafka, RabbitMQ), RESTful APIs, and asynchronous processing to support high availability and low-latency requirements.
  • Manage vendor relationships and third-party integration providers: evaluate iPaaS and middleware offerings, lead procurement activities, negotiate support contracts, and govern vendor deliverables and SLAs.
  • Drive API lifecycle management: design API contracts, publish API documentation and developer portals, manage versioning, and implement API analytics and rate-limiting to support developer productivity and API monetization strategies.
  • Implement and oversee CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment processes for integration artifacts (infrastructure as code, configuration management, automated smoke and regression tests) to accelerate time-to-market and reduce production risk.
  • Lead cross-functional integration projects and programs: coordinate release schedules, manage interdependencies, facilitate technical design reviews, and ensure stakeholder sign-off for complex multi-system integrations.
  • Establish and monitor integration KPIs and SLAs (latency, throughput, error rates, MTTR) and provide regular reporting to business and technology leadership; proactively drive remediation for capacity, performance, and reliability issues.
  • Collaborate with Security, Compliance, and Privacy teams to ensure integrations adhere to regulatory and corporate data protection requirements (GDPR, HIPAA where applicable), implement data encryption, masking, and secure transmission practices.
  • Mentor and grow a high-performing integration team: hire, mentor, conduct performance reviews, define career paths for engineers, and create a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.
  • Oversee integration testing strategies including contract testing, end-to-end test orchestration, and environment management to ensure high-quality releases and minimize production incidents.
  • Translate complex business processes and requirements into technical integration solutions, conducting requirements workshops, process mapping, data mapping, and facilitating decision-making between business and IT stakeholders.
  • Lead migration and transformation initiatives to modernize legacy integrations, refactor monolithic integration flows into microservices and API-first architectures, and reduce technical debt while maintaining business continuity.
  • Manage budgets and resource allocation for integration projects, forecast costs for middleware licensing, cloud consumption, and third-party services, and optimize for cost-performance tradeoffs.
  • Coordinate incident management and post-incident root cause analysis for integration-related outages; define and implement corrective actions, runbooks, and continuous monitoring to improve resilience.
  • Ensure data quality and integrity across integrated systems by defining validation rules, reconciliation processes, and automated data cleansing techniques in collaboration with data engineering and product teams.
  • Advocate for and implement observability across integration platforms using logging, distributed tracing, and metrics (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, ELK stack) to enable rapid troubleshooting and capacity planning.
  • Drive standardization and reuse of integration components, templates, and libraries to accelerate delivery across teams and reduce duplicated work and inconsistent implementations.
  • Serve as the escalation point for complex integration issues, providing technical leadership in crisis situations and coordinating cross-team response until full resolution.
  • Design and oversee secure onboarding and integration of external partners and B2B EDI/AS2 connections, ensuring contractual, security, and technical requirements are met.
  • Evaluate, introduce and operationalize automation for repetitive integration tasks, such as environment provisioning, schema validation, and deployment promotion, improving developer efficiency and reducing errors.
  • Collaborate with Data Governance and Master Data Management (MDM) teams to align integration flows with data ownership, stewardship policies, and canonical data models across the organization.

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 regular training and enablement sessions for application teams on integration best practices, API design, and use of integration tooling and developer portals.
  • Maintain and update integration documentation, runbooks, and run teams through periodic disaster recovery and failover drills.
  • Participate in procurement and evaluation of new integration tooling and cloud services by providing technical requirements and scoring vendor proofs-of-concept.
  • Facilitate cross-organizational architecture councils and integration guilds to share lessons learned and evolve standards over time.
  • Coordinate with network and infrastructure teams to provision secure connectivity, VPNs, and peering required for hybrid integration scenarios.
  • Assist in regulatory audits related to system interconnectivity, logging, and access controls for integrated systems.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proven experience with iPaaS and middleware platforms such as MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, IBM App Connect, SAP PI/PO, or Azure Logic Apps.
  • Strong API design and management skills (REST, GraphQL, SOAP), API gateway experience (Apigee, Kong, Azure API Management), and API lifecycle governance.
  • Expertise in integration patterns and technologies: ESB, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ), JMS, ETL/ELT tools, and event-driven architectures.
  • Familiarity with cloud platforms and services: AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, SQS), Azure (Functions, Service Bus), or GCP (Pub/Sub), including hybrid connectivity and VPC networking.
  • Solid understanding of authentication and authorization protocols: OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, TLS, and secure credential management.
  • Experience with CI/CD tools and practices (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps), containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes) for integration workloads.
  • Proficiency with monitoring and observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, and distributed tracing.
  • Data mapping, transformation and schema design experience (JSON, XML, Avro), including contract testing and schema registries.
  • Knowledge of database technologies (relational and NoSQL), and data integration patterns, plus experience with data governance and MDM concepts.
  • Strong troubleshooting and debugging skills across distributed systems, including root cause analysis for latency, throughput, and error patterns.
  • Familiarity with enterprise architecture frameworks (TOGAF) and ability to produce solution architecture diagrams and integration blueprints.
  • Understanding of regulatory and compliance controls affecting integrations (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS) and security best practices.
  • Experience managing third-party integrations, EDI, SFTP, AS2, and partner onboarding workflows.
  • Ability to write and review technical specifications, runbooks, and high-quality documentation for engineering teams.

Soft Skills

  • Strong leadership and people-management skills: hiring, coaching, and developing cross-functional integration teams.
  • Excellent stakeholder management and communication: translate technical constraints into business impact, and manage expectations across engineering and business partners.
  • Strategic thinking and prioritization: balance short-term delivery with long-term architectural decisions and technical debt reduction.
  • Exceptional collaboration skills: work effectively with product managers, architects, security, QA, and operations.
  • High sense of ownership and accountability: drive issues to closure and follow through on commitments.
  • Problem-solving and analytical mindset with attention to detail and quality.
  • Adaptability to changing business needs and comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-paced environments.
  • Facilitation and negotiation skills for cross-team alignment and vendor management.
  • Coaching and mentoring aptitude to uplift team capabilities and foster a culture of continuous learning.
  • Time management and ability to orchestrate multiple concurrent projects and priorities.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration (MBA) with a technology focus, or equivalent technical graduate certification.
  • Certifications in relevant platforms (MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect, Dell Boomi Professional, AWS/Azure certifications, TOGAF).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Data Engineering
  • Enterprise Architecture

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12+ years in systems integration, middleware, or API/platform engineering roles.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years leading integration projects and teams, with demonstrated experience in architecting and operating enterprise-grade integration platforms.
  • Hands-on technical background combined with program and vendor management experience.
  • Experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, retail) and managing compliance-driven integrations is a plus.
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