Integration Lead

◈  Integration Architecture & Strategy

• Define and own the enterprise integration strategy, standards, and architecture patterns (REST, SOAP, event-driven, message-based) across all digital products and platforms.
• Design scalable, loosely coupled integration architectures connecting core enterprise systems (ERP, HRMS, DMS, correspondence systems) with digital front-ends and low-code applications.
• Evaluate, select, and govern integration middleware, API gateways, and iPaaS solutions.
• Establish and enforce API design standards, versioning policies, naming conventions, and contract-first development practices across teams.

◈  API Lifecycle Management

• Manage the full API lifecycle: design, development, testing, publishing, versioning, deprecation, and retirement.
• Configure and administer the API gateway layer — rate limiting, throttling, authentication policies, traffic routing, and plugin management.
• Maintain an API catalogue/developer portal to enable internal and external consumers to discover, test, and onboard to available services.
• Define and monitor API SLAs, uptime targets, latency thresholds, and error budgets using observability tools.

◈  Hands-On Integration Development

• Build and maintain APIs, connectors, webhooks, and data transformation pipelines.
• Deliver integrations for low-code platforms (OutSystems and Pega), including REST/SOAP consumption, service wrappers, and connector patterns.
• Implement data mapping, transformation, and enrichment logic across heterogeneous systems, including bilingual (Arabic/English) payloads and character encoding.
• Design event-driven and asynchronous integration patterns (message queues, pub/sub) for decoupled, resilient communication.
• Build integrations with government shared services, national identity platforms, and inter-entity data exchange layers.

◈  Governance, Security & Quality

• Ensure all integrations adhere to data governance, privacy, and information security standards — including PII and sensitive government data handling.
• Implement robust error handling, retry logic, circuit-breaker patterns, dead-letter queuing, and comprehensive logging.
• Conduct integration testing, contract testing, and end-to-end validation in collaboration with QA teams.
• Maintain integration documentation: architecture diagrams, data flow maps, API specifications (OpenAPI/Swagger), and runbooks.

◈  AI-Enabled Integration & Leadership

• Use LLM-based assistants to accelerate integration workflows — generating API code, drafting mapping specs, creating OpenAPI docs, and debugging transformation logic.
• Identify opportunities to embed AI agents into pipelines for intelligent routing, anomaly detection, automated data quality checks, and self-healing error recovery.
• Collaborate with Development, DevOps, QA, Platform, and Business Analysis teams within agile squads.
• Mentor team members on integration best practices, API design principles, and effective AI tool usage.
• Serve as primary point of contact for integration escalations, production incidents, and cross-system dependency resolution.

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Experience: 7+ years in integration development, API management, or enterprise middleware roles.
• API Gateway: Demonstrated experience designing and managing API gateways at scale (Kong Gateway hands-on experience strongly preferred).
• Delivery: Experience working in agile delivery environments, ideally within government or large enterprise contexts.
• Language: Proficiency in English (required); working proficiency in Arabic is strongly preferred.
• AI Tools: Hands-on experience with AI-powered development tools — code assistants, LLM-based documentation generation, intelligent debugging — is strongly preferred.

Category	Tools & Technologies
API Design & Governance	REST, SOAP, GraphQL, OpenAPI / Swagger, Contract-First Development
API Gateway	Kong Gateway (strongly preferred), Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management
Integration Middleware / iPaaS	MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Apache Camel, or cloud-native equivalents
Low-Code Platforms	OutSystems, Pega (REST/SOAP consumption, service wrappers, connector patterns)
Auth & Security	OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, API Keys, mTLS
Messaging & Event Streaming	RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, Azure Service Bus
Data Formats	JSON, XML, CSV, Avro, Protobuf
CI/CD & DevOps	Automated API deployment pipelines, contract testing, integration validation
Observability & Monitoring	Datadog, Grafana, ELK Stack, Prometheus
AI & LLM Tools	LLM-based code assistants, AI documentation generation, intelligent debugging tools

Preferred Technical Skills

• Hands-on Kong Gateway experience — open-source or Enterprise edition.
• Experience with at least one major iPaaS platform (MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, or Apache Camel).
• Familiarity with UAE government shared services and national identity platform integrations.
• Working knowledge of bilingual (Arabic/English) data handling, character encoding, and RTL considerations.
• Experience deploying and managing containerised integration services (Docker / Kubernetes).

Working Model: Embedded within agile product squads, collaborating closely with Development, DevOps, QA, Platform, and Business Analysis teams to ensure seamless end-to-end integration delivery.