Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Integration Supervisor
💰 $ - $
🎯 Role Definition
As an Integration Supervisor, you will own the operational delivery and technical leadership of system-to-system integrations, API ecosystems, middleware platforms and B2B/EDI channels. You will supervise an integration engineering team, coordinate cross-functional releases, enforce integration standards and runbooks, and partner with architecture, security and product teams to ensure reliable, secure, and scalable data flows across the enterprise. This role requires hands-on technical judgment, people leadership, and a strong focus on observability, automation and continuous improvement.
📈 Career Progression
Typical Career Path
Entry Point From:
- Integration Analyst / Integration Engineer
- Systems Engineer / Middleware Engineer
- Technical Lead for APIs or ETL
Advancement To:
- Integration Manager / Head of Integration
- Director of Integration & Middleware Services
- Enterprise Architect / VP of Engineering Operations
Lateral Moves:
- Solutions Architect (Integration / API)
- Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer
- B2B/EDI Program Manager
Core Responsibilities
Primary Functions
- Lead, mentor and manage a team of integration engineers and specialists, coordinating daily work assignments, performance reviews, and career development plans to ensure the team meets SLAs and project milestones.
- Define, document and enforce enterprise integration standards, patterns and best practices (API-first, event-driven, batch/ETL conventions) to reduce technical debt, speed onboarding and improve interoperability.
- Architect and review integration designs for new projects and enhancements, ensuring solutions meet non-functional requirements for availability, scalability, security and maintainability across middleware and iPaaS platforms.
- Oversee the full lifecycle of integration delivery from requirements intake, mapping and transformation design, development and testing, through release orchestration and post-release verification.
- Own operational readiness and runbook creation for integrations and APIs, including incident response procedures, escalation matrices, rollback plans and SLA/KPI definitions.
- Drive automation of build, test and deployment pipelines for integration artifacts (APIs, connectors, integration flows, ETL jobs) using CI/CD tools to reduce manual intervention and release risk.
- Monitor integration health and performance using observability tools and dashboards, investigate anomalies, and implement remediation and capacity planning to prevent recurring outages.
- Manage third-party integration vendors and iPaaS providers (e.g., MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Azure Logic Apps), including procurement input, contract SLAs, onboarding and technical oversight of vendor-delivered integrations.
- Coordinate cross-functional change management with architecture, security, network and application owners to schedule releases, migrations and cutovers with minimal business disruption.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) after incidents, produce clear technical and business-impacting postmortems, and enforce corrective actions to eliminate repeat failures.
- Oversee B2B/EDI onboarding and ongoing operations including mapping, testing, certificate management, trading partner coordination and change management for high-volume file exchanges.
- Establish and maintain integration governance including an integration catalog, API inventory, versioning policy and retirement schedules to enable discoverability and reduce duplicate integrations.
- Ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements for data-in-motion and data-at-rest, including encryption, key management, access controls and audit trails for integration interfaces.
- Collaborate with product owners and business stakeholders to translate functional requirements into technical integration stories, ensuring traceability and alignment to business outcomes.
- Conduct performance tuning and optimization of integration flows, middleware brokers and ETL pipelines to meet throughput and latency objectives under realistic production loads.
- Plan and manage migration projects such as moving on-premise middleware to cloud-based iPaaS or consolidating multiple integration platforms into unified tooling while minimizing business impact.
- Lead capacity planning and cost optimization for integration infrastructure, balancing performance, resiliency and platform expenditure within budgetary constraints.
- Oversee automated testing strategies for integrations including unit, integration, contract and end-to-end testing to surface regressions prior to production deployments.
- Maintain comprehensive operational documentation including architecture diagrams, interface specifications, mapping files and runbooks to support knowledge transfer and auditability.
- Serve as the primary point of escalation for complex integration incidents and high-severity production issues, coordinating multi-disciplinary teams to restore service and communicate status to stakeholders.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives such as reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR), increasing automation coverage, and introducing observability-led engineering practices across the integration lifecycle.
Secondary Functions
- Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to help product teams validate integration-related assumptions and improve data quality.
- Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by advising on integration patterns that enable analytics, reporting and real-time data distribution.
- Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements and ensure integration solutions support downstream consumption (analytics, BI, fraud prevention).
- Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team to align integration delivery with broader product and platform roadmaps.
- Provide onboarding and training sessions to application teams and business stakeholders on integration best practices, API usage and vendor tools.
- Maintain and review capacity, performance and cost reports for integration environments and recommend optimizations or scaling strategies.
- Participate in vendor selection evaluations, proof-of-concepts and technical due diligence to recommend the most suitable integration platforms and tools.
- Coordinate with security and compliance teams to prepare for internal and external audits, providing required integration artifacts and evidence of controls.
Required Skills & Competencies
Hard Skills (Technical)
- Proven expertise in enterprise integration patterns and middleware technologies (API gateways, ESBs, message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMQ).
- Deep knowledge of RESTful and SOAP-based API design, API lifecycle management, OpenAPI/Swagger, and API versioning strategies.
- Hands-on experience with iPaaS and middleware platforms (e.g., MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Azure Logic Apps, AWS API Gateway) and designing connectors/adapters.
- Strong experience with ETL/data integration tools and principles, data transformation, mapping, and optimization for batch and streaming scenarios.
- Proficiency in data interchange formats and protocols: JSON, XML, Avro, Protobuf, EDI (X12/EDIFACT), SFTP, AS2, and message queuing.
- Solid scripting and programming skills for integration automation (Python, Java, Node.js, or similar) and ability to review code from team members.
- Familiarity with CI/CD tooling for integration artefacts (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps), automated testing frameworks and release orchestration.
- Experience with observability, monitoring and logging tools (Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Splunk, ELK) to build actionable dashboards and alerts.
- Knowledge of security best practices for integrations: OAuth2/OpenID Connect, mutual TLS, certificate management, encryption and IAM controls.
- Practical experience with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and hybrid integration architectures including network, VPC, and connectivity considerations.
- Experience managing B2B/EDI trading partner relationships, mappings, certificate lifecycle and compliance requirements.
- Familiarity with database and storage technologies (SQL, NoSQL, data lakes) and the implications for integration performance and consistency.
Soft Skills
- Strong leadership and people management skills with a bias for coaching, constructive feedback and cross-training to grow a high-performing integration team.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills to translate technical implications into business impact and to manage expectations during incidents and projects.
- Analytical problem-solving skills with a methodical approach to root cause analysis and continuous improvement.
- Ability to prioritize multiple competing demands and make pragmatic trade-offs while maintaining quality and reliability targets.
- Strong project management and organizational skills with experience coordinating cross-functional releases and vendor deliverables.
- Customer-focused mindset with the ability to work collaboratively with business owners, product managers and downstream consumers.
Education & Experience
Educational Background
Minimum Education:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related technical field.
Preferred Education:
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or Business Technology Management, or equivalent professional certifications in integration platforms (e.g., MuleSoft Certified Developer, Dell Boomi Professional, AWS/Azure certifications).
Relevant Fields of Study:
- Computer Science
- Software Engineering
- Information Systems / MIS
- Electrical or Computer Engineering
- Data Science / Analytics
Experience Requirements
Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years in systems integration, middleware or API engineering roles with at least 2–3 years in a supervisory or lead capacity.
Preferred: Demonstrated experience leading integration teams at enterprise scale, managing iPaaS/middleware migrations, delivering B2B/EDI programs, and implementing integration governance and CI/CD practices.