Integration Specialist

AAM - American Axle & Manufacturing•Detroit, MI

About The Position

We are seeking a skilled Integration Specialist to design, build, and maintain the data pipelines, API ecosystems, and streaming architectures that power our platform. In this role, you will collaborate with various applications, business users and data teams to connect systems across the enterprise, ensuring reliable, real-time, and batch data flows between internal services and third-party platforms. You will bring hands-on expertise in API design and integration, event-driven streaming, and modern ETL/ELT processes, combined with deep familiarity with contemporary data platforms and databases.

Requirements

3–5 years of professional experience in integration engineering, data engineering, or a closely related software engineering role.
Proficiency in at least one backend language commonly used for integration work (Python, Java, PLSQL).
Strong understanding of RESTful API design principles, HTTP semantics, and API security standards.
Demonstrated experience building and maintaining streaming data pipelines with Kafka, Kinesis, or equivalent technologies.
Hands-on ETL/ELT experience using at least one major orchestration platform (Informatica, Talend, ODI).
Working knowledge of at least one cloud data warehouse or lakehouse platform.
Solid command of SQL across relational databases.
Experience with containerization (Docker) and familiarity with CI/CD pipelines for integration artifacts.
Ability to read and produce clear technical documentation, data flow diagrams, and API contracts.

Nice To Haves

Experience with GraphQL API design and federation patterns.
Familiarity with schema registries and data serialization formats such as Avro or JSON Schema.
Exposure to data mesh or data fabric architectural patterns.
Relevant cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, or GCP) in data or integration services.
Prior experience working with iPaaS platforms such as MuleSoft or Informatica.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and publish RESTful and GraphQL APIs adhering to OpenAPI/Swagger standards.
Develop and maintain API gateway configurations, authentication flows (OAuth 2.0, API keys, JWT), and rate-limiting policies.
Integrate third-party SaaS platforms, microservices, and internal applications using synchronous and asynchronous communication patterns.
Create and maintain comprehensive API documentation, versioning strategies, and deprecation policies.
Build and maintain real-time streaming data pipelines using platforms such as Apache Kafka, Confluent, or AWS Kinesis.
Monitor streaming pipeline health, manage topic configurations, and tune consumer/producer performance for high-throughput scenarios.
Work with stream processing frameworks to perform transformations, aggregations, and enrichment of in-flight data.
Design and implement robust ETL and ELT pipelines to ingest, transform, and load data across operational and analytical systems.
Orchestrate data workflows.
Handle incremental loads, change data capture (CDC), and full refresh strategies based on business and performance requirements.
Implement data quality checks, validation frameworks, and alert to ensure integrity throughout the pipeline.
Work with modern cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Oracle or Azure Synapse Analytics.
Optimize relational database queries (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server) and NoSQL stores.
Collaborate with data architects to design schemas optimized for both OLTP and OLAP workloads.
Participate in database performance tuning, index strategies, and query optimization initiatives.
Partner with software engineers, data engineers, and architects to understand integration requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and sprint planning within an Agile/Scrum delivery framework.
Contribute to incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortems for integration failures.
Maintain runbooks, architectural diagrams, and integration inventories as living documentation.