Integration & API Architect

Role Summary

The Integration & API Architect defines and governs enterprise integration architecture, ensuring secure, scalable, and reusable integration patterns across platforms, applications, cloud services, and smart solutions. The role establishes API-first and event-driven standards, interoperability frameworks, and governance practices to enable reliable system integration and rapid onboarding of services and vendors.

Working closely with architecture, cloud, security, infrastructure, and data teams, the architect ensures integrations meet performance, resilience, observability, and compliance requirements while providing technical leadership through architecture reviews, standards, and implementation guidance.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain enterprise integration architecture covering APIs, messaging, event streaming, and interoperability standards.
• Establish API governance standards including lifecycle management, naming conventions, versioning, documentation, and deprecation policies.
• Design secure API access models using OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, token scopes, and API security best practices.
• Define event-driven architecture standards including schemas, retries, dead-letter queues, idempotency, and event ordering.
• Establish data contract governance including schema validation, contract testing, and CI/CD integration practices.
• Define resiliency patterns such as retries, circuit breakers, failover, throttling, caching, and timeout management.
• Govern the use of API gateways, integration platforms, and messaging technologies across enterprise environments.
• Lead onboarding and integration activities for internal systems, external platforms, and third-party vendors.
• Define observability standards including logging, distributed tracing, telemetry, monitoring, and SLA/SLO reporting.
• Conduct architecture reviews and provide technical assurance for integration implementations and production readiness.
• Develop reusable integration standards, reference architectures, technical documentation, and operational runbooks.
• Collaborate with cybersecurity and compliance teams to ensure integrations meet regulatory and data protection requirements.

Required Skills & Competencies

• Strong expertise in API architecture, RESTful services, event-driven systems, streaming platforms, and microservices integration.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, resiliency, and integration reliability patterns.
• Strong knowledge of API security, identity federation, and secure service communication.
• Experience establishing governance frameworks and enforcing standards across multiple teams and vendors.
• Expertise in integration observability, monitoring, centralized logging, and telemetry frameworks.
• Strong analytical, documentation, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field. Master’s degree preferred.
• 8+ years of experience in enterprise integration architecture, middleware engineering, or API platform design.
• Hands-on experience with API gateways, messaging platforms, event streaming technologies, and cloud-native integrations.
• Experience delivering enterprise integration governance, versioning strategies, service catalogs, and automated testing practices.
• Experience working in multi-vendor enterprise delivery environments.

Preferred Technologies & Tools

• API Management: OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, Swagger, Postman
• API Gateways: Azure API Management, Apigee, Kong, MuleSoft
• Messaging & Streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ, Event Hubs
• Cloud & DevOps: Azure, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub, Azure DevOps
• Observability: OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, ELK Stack

Soft Skills

• Strong leadership and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement abilities.
• Ability to simplify complex integration challenges into scalable solutions.
• Strong problem-solving, negotiation, and risk management capabilities.
• Detail-oriented, proactive, and delivery-focused mindset.