Integration Architect - Kafka
Rate: £600 per day (Outside IR35)Duration: 6-month contractLocation: London - 4 days per week onsite
Overview:
I'm currently supporting a client on a major transformation programme who are looking to appoint a highly experienced Integration Architect to define and lead their enterprise integration strategy.
This is a hands-on technical architecture position where you'll be responsible for shaping the future integration landscape, establishing architectural standards and building a modern event-driven ecosystem. You'll work closely with engineering leadership to create an integration capability centred around Kafka, microservices, cloud native technologies and API-first principles, whilst helping to build and mentor a high performing integration engineering team.
Responsibilities
- Define and own the enterprise integration strategy across multiple business domains.
- Design a scalable, event-driven architecture using Kafka as the core messaging platform.
- Establish best practice integration patterns, architectural standards and governance.
- Build and help scale a modern integration engineering capability, providing technical leadership and mentoring.
- Design resilient, loosely coupled microservices architectures following domain driven design principles.
- Lead architecture across APIs, messaging, streaming and asynchronous communication.
- Drive the adoption of API-first and event-first development practices.
- Produce high-quality architecture artefacts including target-state architectures, roadmaps, integration blueprints and technical standards.
- Work closely with engineering teams to ensure architecture is delivered in line with strategic objectives.
- Collaborate with senior stakeholders to align business goals with technical delivery.
- Champion modern engineering practices including automation, CI/CD and cloud native development.
Essential Skills
- Proven experience creating and delivering enterprise integration strategies.
- Extensive experience designing event-driven architectures.
- Strong commercial experience with Kafka and event streaming platforms.
- Deep understanding of microservices architecture and distributed systems.
- API-first architecture using REST and asynchronous messaging patterns.
- Strong Java and Spring Boot background.
- Experience designing cloud-native integration platforms on AWS.
- Strong understanding of messaging patterns, event sourcing and eventual consistency.
- Experience establishing architectural governance and integration standards.
- Excellent stakeholder management and technical leadership skills.
Desirable Skills
- Kubernetes (EKS) and container platforms
- AWS services including API Gateway, SNS, SQS and EventBridge
- DevOps and CI/CD pipelines
- Integration observability and monitoring
- Financial Services experience ideally (Payments, FX or Banking)
Experience Required
- 10+ years in solution or integration architecture.
- Experience building enterprise integration capabilities from both a technical and strategic perspective.
- Proven track record delivering large-scale event-driven platforms using Kafka.
- Experience leading architecture across multiple engineering teams.
- Strong background in cloud-native software engineering and distributed systems.
- Comfortable operating as both a strategic architect and a hands-on technical leader.
Reasonable Adjustments:
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