Lead Integration Architect📣 إعلان

About the Role

KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) is seeking a Lead Integration Architect to join its team in Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. This full-time role is for a senior technical leader responsible for designing, building, and modernizing the enterprise integration ecosystems. The position requires an expert capable of architecting modern, high-performing, secure cloud and hybrid integration platforms, while also actively contributing to code, creating reusable frameworks, and mentoring engineering teams. The Lead Integration Architect will own the technical roadmap for how distributed applications, SaaS systems, data platforms, and legacy environments connect and communicate securely using contemporary DevSecOps practices.

Architectural Design and Governance

The Lead Integration Architect will establish and maintain the foundational elements of KAUST's integration landscape, ensuring adherence to best practices and strategic alignment. Key responsibilities include:

• Owning the integration reference architecture and roadmap, covering integration patterns, API management, iPaaS/connectors, event-driven messaging, workflow/orchestration, data movement, and legacy remediation.
• Establishing and enforcing engineering standards and governance for API design, event naming, versioning, documentation, automated testing, code review, source control, deployment, secrets management, resilience, error handling, and supportability.
• Building and maintaining an integration catalogue to provide visibility into existing integrations, ownership, data flow, consuming systems, and associated operational and security risks.
• Providing technical design assurance for projects and procurements to ensure new platforms meet KAUST integration standards, avoid unnecessary customization, and include suitable APIs, event capability, identity integration, data export, and support arrangements.

Engineering and Delivery Leadership

This role involves hands-on technical leadership in the development and maintenance of integration services, focusing on robust and reliable delivery:

• Designing, building, and maintaining integration services including APIs, events, message flows, connectors, transformation scripts, tests, and CI/CD pipelines, with personal hands-on engineering contributions.
• Developing robust and reusable integration patterns using appropriate technologies such as REST/OData APIs, SOAP, IDocs/BAPIs, event/webhook patterns, message queues, SFTP/managed file transfer, ETL/ELT, and change data capture.
• Improving operational observability and service reliability by implementing monitoring, alerting, dashboards, audit logging, reconciliation, incident response practices, and post-incident improvement actions for critical integrations.
• Reducing legacy integration risk through assessment of point-to-point interfaces, database links, batch jobs, unmanaged scripts, and vendor feeds, followed by wrapping, replacing, retiring, or tolerating them via an explicit remediation plan.
• Managing assigned platform, vendor, and financial responsibilities, including input to budgets, licenses, vendor performance, service levels, and contract requirements related to integration platforms and delivery partners.

Collaboration and Mentorship

The Lead Integration Architect will foster a collaborative engineering culture and act as a key advisor across various technical and business teams:

• Leading, coaching, and developing a small technical team, including work allocation, mentoring, performance input, recruitment support, quality assurance, and fostering a collaborative engineering culture.
• Acting as a trusted advisor to enterprise applications, data, cybersecurity, identity, infrastructure, and business product teams to ensure integration designs support KAUST business processes, master data quality, security, privacy, and operational resilience.
• Maturing Agile and DevOps ways of working by running a visible backlog, prioritizing demand with stakeholders, planning iterative delivery, improving deployment frequency, and reducing operational risk through automation.
• Performing other applicable tasks and duties assigned within the realm of the employee's knowledge, skills, and abilities in the field of their position.

Experience and Qualifications

Candidates for this Lead Integration Architect position should demonstrate a strong background in enterprise integration and technical leadership.

• A minimum of 5-10 years of experience in integration architecture, development, and leadership roles.
• Proven expertise in designing, building, and modernizing complex enterprise integration ecosystems.
• Demonstrated ability to architect modern cloud and hybrid integration platforms.
• Hands-on experience in coding, creating reusable frameworks, and implementing DevSecOps practices.

Work Environment

This full-time role is based at the KAUST campus in Thuwal, Makkah, Saudi Arabia. The successful candidate will work within a dynamic technical environment, leading a small team and collaborating with various departments across the university to ensure seamless and secure system integrations.