The Integration & API Architect defines and governs the integration architecture for enterprise platforms, ensuring consistent, secure, and reusable integration patterns across vendor-delivered capabilities and smart-city solutions. The role establishes API-first and event-driven standards, data contracts, and interoperability requirements that enable ministries, system integrators, and solution teams to onboard and integrate reliably with shared services (identity, observability, data platform, service catalog).
The architect ensures integration designs meet performance, resilience, and compliance requirements, and provides architecture assurance through design reviews, reference implementations, and go-live readiness gates.
Duties & Responsibilities
- Define integration reference architecture covering APIs, events, messaging, and interoperability patterns.
- Own API governance: OpenAPI/AsyncAPI standards, naming, versioning, backward compatibility, lifecycle, and deprecation.
- Define secure API access patterns (Entra/OIDC, token scopes, mTLS, API keys where needed), rate limits, and quotas.
- Design event-driven architecture patterns and standards (topics, schemas, ordering, retries, dead-letter queues, idempotency).
- Establish data contract practices (schema registry, validation, consumer-driven contracts, contract testing in CI).
- Define integration resiliency patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, bulkheads, caching) and observability requirements.
- Govern use of API gateways and integration runtimes, including productization of APIs in the service catalog.
- Drive integration onboarding for vendors and use cases: connectivity, private endpoints, service exposure, and monitoring.
- Provide architecture assurance and technical leadership across multiple vendors; review designs and validate implementation.
- Support operations: integration runbooks, SLA/SLO dashboards, incident RCA patterns, and continuous improvement backlog.
Skills & Abilities
- Strong expertise in API design and integration architecture (REST, events, streaming, async workflows).
- Ability to define practical standards and enforce governance across multiple delivery teams/vendors.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems reliability patterns and integration observability.
- Strong security mindset for APIs and data movement in regulated environments.
- Excellent documentation and communication skills (contracts, diagrams, standards, playbooks).
Education & Background
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Cybersecurity, or related field; Master's degree highly preferred.
- 8+ years in integration architecture or senior engineering roles for enterprise platforms.
- Experience with API gateways and event streaming/messaging in production at scale.
- Experience integrating identity platforms (Entra/OIDC), private networking, and secure service exposure models.
- Proven record delivering integration governance (catalogs, standards, versioning, testing strategies).
- Experience working with system integrators/vendors and defining acceptance criteria for integration deliverables.
Preferred Tools / Soft Skills
Preferred Tools
- API & governance: OpenAPI/AsyncAPI, Postman, Swagger tooling, schema registries
- Gateways & messaging: Azure API Management / Apigee / Kong; Kafka / Event Hubs; queues with DLQ
- Observability & delivery: OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace/Datadog, GitHub/Azure DevOps, contract testing frameworks
Soft Skills
- Strong facilitation for cross-team integration alignment and standards adoption
- Ability to simplify complex integration landscapes into clear patterns and decisions
- Negotiation skills to manage competing stakeholder/vendor requirements
- Proactive risk management and ownership of integration quality outcomes
- Collaborative, delivery-oriented mindset with strong attention to detail
- Excellent written and verbal communication, able to convey complex governance concepts to non-technical stakeholders
- Acts as a trusted advisor, fostering cross-functional collaboration and upholding high ethical and professional standards
- Builds productive relationships across all organizational levels, promoting transparency, accountability, and responsible data/AI use
