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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Cloud Integration Specialist

💰 $90,000 - $150,000

CloudIntegrationDevOpsITSaaS

🎯 Role Definition

The Cloud Integration Specialist is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining secure, scalable integration solutions that connect cloud-native applications, on-premises systems, SaaS platforms, and third-party services. This role focuses on API-led design, iPaaS implementations, event-driven architectures, and continuous integration/delivery of integration artifacts. The specialist partners with architects, developers, security teams, and business stakeholders to translate integration requirements into robust, operational solutions that meet performance, reliability, and compliance goals.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Integration Engineer / Middleware Engineer
  • Cloud Engineer / Cloud Operations Engineer
  • API Developer / Backend Developer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Cloud Integration Specialist / Lead
  • Cloud Integration Architect / Enterprise Integration Architect
  • Engineering Manager / Head of Integration

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps / Platform Engineer
  • Solutions Architect / Technical Product Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design and implement end-to-end cloud integration solutions that connect SaaS platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Workday), cloud services (AWS/Azure/GCP), and on-premise systems using API-first and event-driven design patterns; ensure low-latency and high-throughput where required.
  • Lead API integration lifecycle: design RESTful and GraphQL APIs, define contracts, implement versioning strategies, document OpenAPI/Swagger specifications, and collaborate with API product owners to ensure discoverability and governance.
  • Implement and manage iPaaS solutions (e.g., MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Informatica Cloud) including developing integration flows, connectors, and transformation maps, while enforcing reuse and modularity.
  • Develop event-driven and streaming integrations using Kafka, AWS Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub or other messaging platforms to enable real-time data synchronization and asynchronous processing.
  • Build and maintain secure authentication and authorization schemes for integrations including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, API keys, and token lifecycle management; coordinate with security teams to enforce policies and secrets management.
  • Create and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for integration infrastructure using Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates or similar, enabling reproducible, version-controlled deployments.
  • Containerize integration services and orchestrate them on Kubernetes or managed container platforms, defining deployment manifests, Helm charts, and horizontal/vertical scaling policies.
  • Implement CI/CD pipelines for integration artifacts using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps to automate testing, linting, building, and deployment into staging/production environments.
  • Design robust error handling, retry logic, circuit breakers and idempotency patterns for integrations to ensure resilience and data integrity under failure scenarios.
  • Develop complex data transformation and mapping logic (XML/JSON/CSV) using XSLT, mapping tools, or custom code and ensure schema validation, canonical data models, and data lineage.
  • Integrate with message brokers and enterprise service buses (ESB), manage queue/topic configurations, and monitor throughput, lag, and processing health to meet SLOs.
  • Establish monitoring, observability and alerting for integrations using Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, ELK/EFK stacks and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) to ensure operational visibility.
  • Collaborate with data engineering teams to design ETL/ELT pipelines for bulk data movement, incremental loading and schema evolution while ensuring data quality and performance.
  • Conduct performance tuning and capacity planning for integration platforms and services, identify bottlenecks, and propose architectural changes for scale and cost efficiency.
  • Lead integration testing efforts: develop unit, integration, end-to-end and contract tests for integrations, implement test automation and ensure test coverage for critical flows.
  • Create and maintain comprehensive technical documentation, runbooks, deployment guides, and architecture diagrams to support onboarding and operational excellence.
  • Manage third-party integration vendor relationships, evaluate connectors and managed services, and recommend commercial solutions versus custom development based on TCO and time-to-market.
  • Implement governance around API and integration lifecycle: enforce naming conventions, security baseline, rate limiting, SLAs, and API cataloging for discoverability and compliance.
  • Troubleshoot production incidents, lead root cause analysis (RCA) post-mortems, and drive remediation and preventative measures across the engineering organization.
  • Mentor and coach junior engineers on integration best practices, code reviews, and design patterns; promote reuse and create shared integration libraries and templates.
  • Partner with product managers and business stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical specifications, estimate effort, and prioritize deliverables based on impact and risk.
  • Ensure compliance with data privacy, regulatory, and industry-specific requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) in integration design and data flows; work with legal/security teams to apply necessary controls.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in vendor evaluation and proof-of-concept tests for integration platforms and middleware.
  • Provide training sessions and create internal knowledge base articles for integration patterns and tools.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud platforms: deep practical experience with AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and native integration services (API Gateway, Lambda, EventBridge, Logic Apps, Cloud Functions).
  • iPaaS and middleware: hands-on with MuleSoft, Dell Boomi, Informatica Cloud, TIBCO, or similar ESB/iPaaS platforms.
  • API design & management: RESTful, GraphQL, SOAP; API Gateway config, OpenAPI/Swagger, API versioning and throttling.
  • Messaging and event streaming: Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub; familiarity with partitions, consumer groups, retention and compaction.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM templates, or similar for automated provisioning of integration infrastructure.
  • Containers & orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm; building and deploying integration microservices in containerized environments.
  • CI/CD and automation: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps; pipeline creation for testing and deployment of integration artifacts.
  • Scripting & programming: Python, Java, Node.js, Groovy or similar languages commonly used to implement connectors, transformations and custom integrations.
  • Data formats and transformation: JSON, XML, CSV, Avro, Parquet; XSLT, mapping tools, and data transformation libraries.
  • Security & identity: OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, JWT, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), secure key rotation practices.
  • Databases and data stores: SQL and NoSQL experience (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB) for integration persistence and caching patterns.
  • Monitoring & observability: CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Prometheus/Grafana, Elastic Stack, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing and log aggregation.
  • Message queuing and backpressure handling, idempotency, and transactional design patterns in distributed systems.
  • Networking fundamentals: VPCs, subnets, NAT, peering, VPNs, firewalls and load balancing concepts relevant to hybrid integrations.
  • Version control and collaboration: Git, branching strategies, code review practices, and repository organization for integration artifacts.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management — able to negotiate priorities between engineering, security, and business teams.
  • Clear verbal and written communicator for architecture reviews, documentation, and executive updates.
  • Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills with a bias for root-cause analysis and durable fixes.
  • Customer-focused mindset: translate business needs into pragmatic technical solutions.
  • Time management and organization with a track record of delivering integration projects on schedule.
  • Collaborative team player who mentors others and promotes knowledge-sharing and reuse.
  • Adaptability to changing priorities and an appetite for learning new cloud-native tools and patterns.
  • Attention to detail for security, data integrity, and operational runbooks.
  • Strategic thinker capable of aligning integration decisions with long-term platform roadmap and cost optimization.
  • Resilience under incident conditions and ability to lead post-incident follow-ups and corrective actions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent professional experience).

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in a related field or advanced certifications in cloud and integration technologies.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing, Networking, Data Engineering
  • Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity

Preferred Certifications (highly desirable):

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect / Developer / DevOps Engineer
  • Azure Solutions Architect / Developer
  • Google Professional Cloud Architect / Professional Data Engineer
  • MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect / Developer
  • Dell Boomi Professional Developer
  • Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) / CKA
  • HashiCorp Terraform Associate
  • CISSP / Security certifications for roles with regulatory responsibilities

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of hands-on experience in systems integration, middleware, cloud platforms, or API engineering.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of progressive experience delivering cloud integrations at scale, with demonstrable experience in at least one iPaaS platform and one major cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCP).
  • Proven track record of implementing production-grade APIs, event-driven integrations, CI/CD for integration artifacts, and operationalizing monitoring/alerting for integration workloads.
  • Experience working in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, or public sector) is a plus.
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