Lead Integration Engineer

Lead Integration Engineer

ECCO Select is a talent acquisition and consulting company specializing in people, process and technology solutions. We provide the talent behind the technology enabling our clients to achieve their goals. For more information about ECCO Select, visit us at

Position Responsibilities:

We are looking for a Lead Integration Engineer to join our enterprise technology team in a critical, hands-on leadership capacity. You will design and deliver robust, cloud-native integration solutions using event-driven architecture on AWS, connecting various enterprise systems, SaaS products, and internal applications. This role requires deep expertise in Apache Kafka, AWS EventBridge, SNS, SQS, ECS, and EKS, coupled with a solid understanding of enterprise integration patterns and service-oriented architecture. Your leadership will drive integration strategy, architectural excellence, and operational reliability at scale.

Specifically, you will:

• Define & Own Integration Strategy: Develop and align the enterprise integration approach to business objectives, leveraging both event-driven and API-based patterns across organizational domains.
• Lead Solution Architecture: Architect solutions for complex, multi-system integrations on AWS including event-driven, service-oriented, microservices, and hybrid connectivity models.
• Optimize Cloud Costs: Monitor and govern AWS resource utilization for integrations, ensuring designs are scalable and cost-effective.
• Manage Integration Roadmap: Develop and maintain the roadmap for the integration platform, balancing the reduction of technical debt with delivery of new features and capabilities.
• Event-Driven Solutions: Design and implement integrations using Apache Kafka (MSK), AWS EventBridge (including Pipes & Scheduler), SNS, and SQS for asynchronous, real-time communication.
• Kafka Platform Management: Oversee the design, deployment, and health of Kafka clusters, including topic standardization, consumer group strategies, schema governance, and dead-letter handling.
• Containerized Integration Services: Architect and deploy workloads on Amazon ECS (Fargate) and EKS, ensuring containerized microservices, event consumers, and API adapters are robust, observable, and scalable.
• API & Service Integration: Build scalable API integrations with AWS API Gateway, Lambda, and Step Functions, applying RESTful, GraphQL, and AsyncAPI patterns using contract-first design.
• Enterprise Messaging & Workflow: Use AWS messaging services to orchestrate distributed, stateful workflows and complex integration scenarios.
• Data Integration: Construct real-time and batch pipelines leveraging Kafka Streams, AWS Kinesis, Glue, and DMS to facilitate data movement across operational and analytical environments.
• Legacy Modernization: Lead initiatives to migrate legacy ESB and point-to-point integrations to modern, event-driven architectures on AWS.
• Infrastructure as Code: Define and manage all integration infrastructure using Terraform, enforcing standards for modules, state management, and compliance checks.
• CI/CD Pipeline Management: Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions for infrastructure, integrations, and security automation practices.
• Enterprise Integration Patterns: Apply canonical integration patterns (message routing, transformation, pub/sub, saga, outbox, etc.) to solve complex problems.
• Governance & Observability: Enforce design standards and implement robust observability using AWS CloudWatch, X-Ray, and distributed tracing.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure least-privilege access, private networking, secrets management, and encryption practices in all integration solutions.
• Production Operations & Support: Lead stability efforts, manage SLAs, on-call escalation, proactive capacity planning, and continuous performance tuning for live workloads.
• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Develop, mentor, and grow the integration engineering team, fostering technical excellence and an inclusive workspace.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner across product, data, security, and architecture teams to deliver aligned integration solutions.
• Documentation & Standards: Maintain architectural records, diagrams, operational runbooks, and engineering quality standards.
• Technology Radar & Innovation: Stay up to date on AWS, Kafka, and integration technology trends, continuously improving platform capability, reliability, and delivery speed.
• Vendor & Partner Oversight: Manage integration points with third-party platforms, SaaS providers, and work with procurement/legal on technical elements of contracts.

Essential Skills, Experience

• Expert-level experience designing and operating integrations leveraging Apache Kafka (preferably Amazon MSK), AWS EventBridge, SNS, SQS, and related cloud-native services.
• Deep understanding and practical application of enterprise integration patterns, event-driven architecture (EDA), and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• Extensive hands-on skill with Amazon ECS (Fargate), EKS, Kubernetes, and containerized deployments—configuring auto-scaling, observability, and high-availability patterns.
• Proven experience developing API integrations using AWS API Gateway, Lambda, Step Functions, and microservices concepts (REST, GraphQL, AsyncAPI, contract-first design).
• Authorship and maintenance of Terraform modules for AWS infrastructure with knowledge of state management, drift detection, and CI/CD (especially with GitHub Actions).
• Demonstrated success leading integration teams and delivering complex, enterprise-wide integration programs.
• Experience modernizing integrations from legacy ESB or direct point-to-point approaches to modern, cloud-based event-driven architectures.
• Solid production experience with AWS-native observability tooling (CloudWatch, X-Ray), security best practices (IAM, VPC, PrivateLink, Secrets Manager), and compliance controls.
• Strong technical writing, documentation, and standards enforcement skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration capabilities to work across various roles and teams in a fast-changing environment.
• Experience working with data movement/streaming: Kafka Streams, Kinesis, Glue, and DMS pipelines is highly desirable.

Technical Proficiencies:

• Messaging & Streaming: Advanced with Kafka (MSK), EventBridge, SNS/SQS, event buses, custom rules.
• Compute & Containers: ECS (Fargate), EKS, Lambda, Docker, Helm, HPA/KEDA, IRSA.
• AWS Services: API Gateway, Step Functions, Kinesis, DMS, Glue, IAM, VPC, Secrets Manager, S3, DynamoDB.
• Infrastructure-as-Code & CI/CD: Terraform (modules, policy-as-code, remote state), GitHub Actions automation, Docker image CI/CD.
• Architectural Patterns: Event-driven, SOA, microservices, event mesh, saga/outbox/CQRS, contract-first API development.
• Coding Languages: Proficiency in at least one modern language—Python, Java, Node.js, or C# /.NET—applied to integrations and containerized workloads.
• Leadership: Technical vision setting, roadmap development, team mentorship, enterprise stakeholder negotiation, and performance management.
• Problem Solving: Skilled in pattern-oriented integration solutions, prioritization, and managing concurrent workstreams to deliver value.
• Soft Skills: Excellent written/verbal communication, collaborative leadership, and comfort with organizational ambiguity.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field—or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of software/integration engineering, with at least 5 years in enterprise integration platforms.
• 4+ years hands-on production experience with Apache Kafka/Amazon MSK, including design/ops of clusters, topics, consumers, and schema management.
• Strong working knowledge of AWS EventBridge, SNS, SQS, ECS (Fargate), and EKS.
• Proven record writing/maintaining infrastructure as code (Terraform) and CI/CD (GitHub Actions).
• Leadership of integration engineering teams and delivery of complex, cross-system programs.
• Modernization experience moving from legacy ESB/point-to-point to event-driven, cloud-native architectures.
• Preferred Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Confluent Kafka Certifications, HashiCorp Terraform Associate, Kubernetes Administrator or Developer.

ECCO Select is committed to hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. Our policy is to provide equal opportunity to all people without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital status, veteran status, age, disability, pregnancy, genetic information, citizenship status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other legally protected category. Veterans of our United States Uniformed Services are specifically encouraged to apply for ECCO Select opportunities.

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