Lead Integration Architect

About the Role

As a Lead Integration Architect, you will serve as a senior technical leader at the forefront of designing, building, and modernizing enterprise integration ecosystems. This pivotal role demands a unique blend of strategic vision and hands-on technical expertise, where you will not only architect high-performing, secure cloud and hybrid integration platforms but also actively contribute to coding, framework development, and team mentorship. Your responsibilities will encompass owning the technical roadmap for seamless and secure connectivity across distributed applications, SaaS systems, data platforms, and legacy environments, all while adhering to contemporary DevSecOps practices. This dual-impact position requires a forward-thinking professional capable of balancing architectural leadership with direct engineering contributions to drive innovation and operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities

The Lead Integration Architect will be entrusted with the following core responsibilities:

Architectural Design, Strategy, and Governance

• Own the integration reference architecture and roadmap: Develop and maintain a comprehensive vision for integration architecture, including API management, iPaaS/connectors, event-driven messaging, workflow/orchestration, data movement, and legacy system remediation.
• Establish engineering standards and governance: Define and enforce best practices for API design, event naming conventions, versioning, documentation, automated testing, code reviews, source control, deployment, secrets management, resilience, error handling, and supportability.
• Build and maintain an integration catalogue: Create and update a centralized repository that provides visibility into existing integrations, their ownership, data flows, system dependencies, and associated operational and security risks.
• Provide technical design assurance: Review and approve project and procurement designs to ensure alignment with KAUST’s integration standards, minimizing unnecessary customization and ensuring robust API capabilities, event handling, identity integration, data export, and support arrangements.

Engineering and Delivery Leadership

• Design and build integration services: Develop and maintain APIs, events, message flows, connectors, transformation scripts, tests, and CI/CD pipelines, actively contributing to hands-on engineering work rather than serving solely in an advisory capacity.
• Develop reusable integration patterns: Create scalable and reusable integration patterns using technologies such as REST/OData APIs, SOAP (where unavoidable), IDocs/BAPIs, event/webhook patterns, message queues, SFTP/managed file transfer, ETL/ELT, and change data capture.
• Enhance operational observability and reliability: Implement monitoring, alerting, dashboards, audit logging, reconciliation, incident response practices, and post-incident improvement actions for critical integrations to ensure high availability and performance.
• Reduce legacy integration risks: Assess and remediate risks associated with point-to-point interfaces, database links, batch jobs, unmanaged scripts, and vendor feeds by wrapping, replacing, retiring, or tolerating them through a structured remediation plan.
• Manage platform and vendor responsibilities: Oversee platform, vendor, and financial responsibilities, including budget inputs, license management, vendor performance evaluation, service level agreements, and contract requirements related to integration platforms and delivery partners.

Collaboration and Mentorship

• Lead and develop a technical team: Mentor, coach, and manage a small technical team, including work allocation, performance reviews, recruitment support, quality assurance, and fostering a collaborative engineering culture.
• Act as a trusted advisor: Collaborate with enterprise applications, data, cybersecurity, identity, infrastructure, and business product teams to ensure integration designs support KAUST’s business processes, master data quality, security, privacy, and operational resilience.
• Mature Agile and DevOps practices: Drive the adoption of Agile and DevOps methodologies by maintaining a visible backlog, prioritizing stakeholder demands, planning iterative delivery, improving deployment frequency, and reducing operational risks through automation.

Qualifications

To excel in this role, candidates must meet the following essential requirements:

• Education: A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and substantial relevant experience.
• Professional Development: Evidence of ongoing professional growth in integration engineering, cloud platforms, and related technologies, demonstrating a commitment to staying current with industry trends and best practices.