2021 Azure Integration Solutions Architect

Role Summary

We are seeking an experienced Azure Integration Solutions Architect to design, build, and govern enterprise-grade integration solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform. This role owns the end-to-end architecture for connecting applications, data stores, and external services—translating business requirements into secure, scalable, and observable integration designs and driving them through to production implementation.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on architect with deep .NET engineering roots, mastery of Azure’s integration and messaging stack, fluency in standard integration design patterns, and a demonstrated history of successfully delivering complex projects. We are looking for a critical thinker who can weigh trade-offs, anticipate failure modes, and make sound architectural decisions in fast-moving environments.

Key Responsibilities

•    Lead the design and implementation of integration solutions using Azure services, spanning messaging, eventing, API management, and orchestration.

•    Architect and apply standard integration design patterns (e.g., publish/subscribe, request/reply, content-based routing, message transformation, claim-check, saga/process manager, retry and dead-letter handling, circuit breaker) to real-world business problems.

•    Champion sound design principles—abstraction, extensibility, and adaptive design—so that solutions remain loosely coupled, easy to extend, and resilient to changing requirements.

•    Design and implement containerized workloads using Azure Container Apps, App Service, and Azure Functions, including container packaging, scaling, and lifecycle management.

•    Model and integrate relational, NoSQL, and caching data stores, selecting the right persistence approach for each workload.

•    Define and enforce security, identity, and secrets-management standards across integration solutions, including Managed Identity, Key Vault, Private Link/Private Endpoints, and OAuth-based authentication and authorization.

•    Produce clear, audit-ready technical documentation and architecture diagrams (Azure architecture, C4) to communicate designs to engineering, security, and leadership stakeholders.

•    Establish observability and monitoring for integration solutions using Application Insights, Log Analytics, Azure Monitor, KQL, alerting, and dashboards.

•    Collaborate across engineering, security, and product teams; provide technical leadership, design reviews, and mentoring.

•    Drive infrastructure-as-code and DevOps practices to deliver repeatable, reversible, and reviewable changes from development through production.

•    Apply critical thinking to evaluate alternatives, surface risks and trade-offs, and recommend pragmatic, well-reasoned solutions.

Architectural Design Principles

The architect is expected to apply the following design principles consistently across all integration solutions:

•    Abstraction: Design to interfaces and contracts rather than concrete implementations—decoupling consumers from providers, hiding integration complexity behind well-defined boundaries, and isolating systems from underlying platform and vendor specifics.

•    Extensibility: Build solutions that accommodate new endpoints, message types, and business capabilities with minimal rework—favoring modular, composable, and configuration-driven designs over hard-coded, one-off implementations.

•    Adaptive Design: Architect for change and scale—designs that respond gracefully to evolving requirements, fluctuating load, and failure conditions through loose coupling, asynchronous patterns, resilience mechanisms, and evolvable schemas and APIs.

Required Qualifications (Mandatory — Expert Level)

Core Azure Platform

•    Compute: Container Apps, App Service, Azure Functions, Virtual Machines

•    Networking: Virtual Networks (VNets), Application Gateway, Azure Front Door, Private Endpoints, NSGs, Azure Firewall

•    Storage & Data Stores: Azure Blob Storage, Azure Files, Azure Table Storage, Cosmos DB

Integration & Messaging

•    Messaging & Eventing: Azure Service Bus, Event Grid, Event Hubs

•    API Management: Azure API Management (APIM)

•    Orchestration: Azure Logic Apps

•    Integration Design Patterns: Demonstrated, hands-on application of standard enterprise integration patterns

Containerization

•    Designing and operating containerized workloads (container packaging, scaling, and lifecycle management) on Azure compute services

Data & Databases

•    Relational: Azure SQL

•    NoSQL: Cosmos DB

•    Caching: Azure Cache for Redis

Security & Identity

•    Managed Identity: System-assigned and User-assigned Managed Identity

•    Secrets & Key Management: Azure Key Vault integration

•    Network Security: Private Link, Private Endpoints

•    Identity & Access: App Registrations

•    Authentication & Authorization: OAuth flows

Infrastructure as Code & DevOps

•    IaC: Terraform

•    DevOps Tooling: Azure DevOps

Observability & Monitoring

•    Application Monitoring: Application Insights

•    Log Management: Log Analytics

•    Platform Monitoring: Azure Monitor

•    Query & Analysis: KQL (Kusto Query Language)

•    Alerting & Visualization: Alerting, dashboards

Microsoft Power Platform

•    Low-Code App Development: Power Apps

•    External Experiences: Power Pages

•    Workflow Automation: Power Automate

•    Data Platform: Dataverse

•    Conversational AI: Copilot Studio

Application Development

•    .NET Engineering: Minimum 10 years of solid .NET coding experience

•    Design & Patterns: Strong knowledge of common .NET patterns and libraries

Architecture & Delivery

•    Documentation: Strong technical documentation skills

•    Visual Modeling: Lucidchart experience

•    Architecture Communication: Azure architecture diagramming

•    Architecture Structuring: C4 diagramming

•    Collaboration: Proven cross-team collaboration

•    Delivery Environment: Experience in fast-paced / start-up environments

•    Agile Tooling: Experience working with Jira

Demonstrated Track Record & Mindset

•    Successful project implementations: A demonstrated history of delivering integration solutions end to end, from design through production, on time and to specification.

•    Critical thinking: The ability to analyze complex problems, evaluate competing approaches, anticipate risks and edge cases, and make defensible architectural decisions.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

•    Graph Database: Graph database design and implementation (e.g., Azure Cosmos DB for Apache Gremlin / graph data modeling)

•    Data Integration: Azure Data Factory

•    Analytics Platform: Microsoft Fabric