Top 12 Integration Architect Skills to Put on Your Resume

Resumes that sing don’t just list tools; they signal judgment. For integration architects, that means pairing solid engineering craft with sharp systems thinking and plainspoken communication. The mix wins interviews, but more than that, it steadies projects when requirements lurch and timelines tighten.

Integration Architect Skills

1. MuleSoft
2. Apache Kafka
3. RESTful APIs
4. SOAP
5. RabbitMQ
6. AWS Lambda
7. Azure Logic Apps
8. Kubernetes
9. Docker
10. Salesforce Integration
11. CI/CD Pipelines
12. OAuth 2.0

1. MuleSoft

MuleSoft is a platform for building application networks that connect apps, data, and devices through APIs, enabling clean integration and efficient data exchange. It shines when you need repeatable patterns, robust governance, and scalable, secure connectivity.

Why It's Important

MuleSoft matters because the Anypoint Platform brings API-led connectivity, reusable assets, and end-to-end management into one place. That shortens delivery time, enforces consistency, and makes change safer across on‑prem and cloud estates.

How to Improve MuleSoft Skills

Level up design, runtime performance, and operations discipline:

1. Lean into API‑led connectivity: Split Experience, Process, and System APIs. Version aggressively. Publish standards for naming, error models, and SLAs.

2. Bake in CI/CD: Automate builds and deployments with MUnit tests, environment‑specific properties, and policy promotion. Support both CloudHub 2.0 and Runtime Fabric footprints.

3. Curate Anypoint Exchange: Treat it like a product catalog. Templates, RAML/AsyncAPI specs, policies—everything discoverable and reusable.

4. Tune performance: Use streaming for large payloads, connection pooling, and backpressure. Cache safely via Object Store v2 or HTTP cache semantics where it fits.

5. Harden security: OAuth 2.0, JWT, client ID enforcement, mTLS. Store secrets via secure properties and managed keystores.

6. Observe everything: Structured logging with correlation IDs, Anypoint Monitoring, Visualizer, and trace propagation. Set alerts that mean something.

7. Design for failure: Global error handlers, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, and dead‑letter routes. Make faults loud but controlled.

8. Stay current: Track runtime updates, connector deprecations, and policy changes. Plan upgrades—don’t drift.

9. Invest in the community: Internal guilds, brown bags, certs. Shared patterns beat heroics.

How to Display MuleSoft Skills on Your Resume

2. Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform for high‑throughput, durable data pipelines and real‑time processing. It’s the backbone for event‑driven and streaming designs at scale.

Why It's Important

Kafka brings scalable pub/sub, replayable logs, and fault‑tolerant storage. That unlocks loose coupling across services and fast, reliable data movement between domains.

How to Improve Apache Kafka Skills

Focus on throughput, resilience, and governance:

1. Run KRaft: Use Zookeeper‑less mode for simpler ops on modern versions. Right‑size brokers, disks, and network bandwidth.

2. Design topics deliberately: Partition counts aligned to consumer concurrency. Use compaction for changelogs, time‑based retention for streams, and prudent message sizes.

3. Guarantee delivery: Idempotent producers, appropriate acks, and transactions where exactly‑once processing matters.

4. Govern schemas: Enforce compatibility (backward or full) with a schema registry. Evolve fields without breaking readers.

5. Harden security: TLS everywhere, SASL for auth, granular ACLs. Separate prod/non‑prod, isolate tenants.

6. Watch the right signals: Lag tracking, broker health (JMX), disk utilization, and consumer rebalance behavior. Standardize dashboards and SLOs.

7. Use the ecosystem: Kafka Connect for sources/sinks, Kafka Streams or ksqlDB for inline processing, and MirrorMaker 2 or cluster linking for DR and multi‑region.

How to Display Apache Kafka Skills on Your Resume

3. RESTful APIs

RESTful APIs use HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE) to act on resources identified by URIs. They’re stateless, cache‑friendly, and language‑agnostic—perfect for interoperable system seams.

Why It's Important

They create a stable contract between teams and systems. Predictable semantics, clear errors, and proper caching translate into faster integration and fewer surprises.

How to Improve RESTful APIs Skills

Make them clean, fast, and safe:

1. Signal clearly: Use precise status codes, problem details for errors, and consistent resource naming.

2. Cache smartly: ETags, Cache‑Control, and conditional requests. Offload where it makes sense.

3. Lock down: TLS by default, OAuth 2.0/OIDC for auth, input validation, and strict JSON schemas.

4. Version with intent: URI or header versioning, with deprecation notices and migration windows.

5. Shape payloads: Compress, paginate, and support sparse fieldsets. Don’t ship what clients won’t use.

6. Protect capacity: Rate limiting, quotas, idempotency keys for retried writes, and sensible timeouts.

7. Document rigorously: OpenAPI 3.1 specs, examples, and testable mocks. Keep docs versioned with the code.

8. Watch and trace: Structured logs, metrics, and distributed tracing. Close the loop with consumer feedback.

How to Display RESTful APIs Skills on Your Resume

4. SOAP

SOAP is an XML‑based protocol for web services. It rides over HTTP (or SMTP), carries rich metadata, and leans on a suite of WS‑* standards for reliability and security.

Why It's Important

In regulated and legacy‑heavy environments, SOAP’s strict contract, extensibility, and enterprise features still power critical integrations.

How to Improve SOAP Skills

Reliability and interoperability first:

1. Security done right: WS‑Security with signatures and encryption, TLS transport, and careful credential handling. Prefer X.509 or federation over raw passwords.

2. Design crisp WSDLs: Strong typing, clear operations, and evolution via namespaces to handle versioning sanely.

3. Go efficient where you can: MTOM for large binaries, compression when safe, and reasonable timeouts.

4. Interoperate: Follow WS‑I Basic Profile guidelines and test across stacks to avoid edge‑case mismatches.

5. Resilience: Retries with backoff, idempotent operations, and message correlation for async patterns.

6. Observe and test: Contract tests, synthetic calls, and clear logging for headers and faults.

How to Display SOAP Skills on Your Resume

5. RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is a message broker that speaks AMQP and more. It decouples producers and consumers, adds routing patterns, and smooths bursts so systems don’t buckle.

Why It's Important

It delivers flexible routing, back‑pressure, and reliable delivery semantics—vital when integrating many services with uneven workloads.

How to Improve RabbitMQ Skills

Target stability and throughput:

1. Mind alarms: Tune memory and disk watermarks so publishers don’t stall unexpectedly.

2. Prefer quorum queues: Use quorum queues for durability and high availability. Keep classic queues for transient, non‑replicated use cases.

3. Manage connections: Reuse connections, open multiple channels per connection, and set consumer prefetch for fair dispatch.

4. Use the management stack: Turn on the management plugin, export metrics, and track queue depth, rates, and consumers.

5. Cluster with intent: Spread nodes across AZs, understand mirroring costs, and test failover paths.

6. Ensure delivery: Publisher confirms and mandatory routing. Handle unroutable messages explicitly.

7. Right‑size messages: Keep payloads modest; batch where it helps; avoid massive single messages.

8. Dead‑letter wisely: DLX and retry queues for poison messages—no infinite loops.

9. Secure the broker: TLS, strong auth backends, and least‑privilege vhosts and permissions.

10. Keep current: Regular updates to RabbitMQ and Erlang/OTP, with blue/green or rolling strategies.

How to Display RabbitMQ Skills on Your Resume

6. AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda runs code on events without servers in your way. It scales fast, charges per use, and plugs into the rest of AWS with minimal fuss.

Why It's Important

For integrations, Lambda sits neatly between services: validate, transform, enrich, route. No servers to patch, no autoscaling groups to babysit.

How to Improve AWS Lambda Skills

Squeeze latency, cost, and risk:

1. Performance: Right‑size memory/CPU, enable provisioned concurrency for cold‑start sensitive paths, and use Graviton (arm64) where possible. For Java, consider SnapStart; reuse connections and clients. Response streaming helps with large payloads.

2. Cost control: Power tune functions, set reserved and account concurrency, and push heavy work async via SQS/EventBridge. Watch ephemeral storage and duration.

3. Security: Least‑privilege IAM, VPC attachment only when needed, and secrets via Secrets Manager or KMS‑encrypted env vars. Sign requests to downstream APIs.

4. Scale reliably: Idempotency keys, retries with DLQs or on‑failure destinations, and regional redundancy for critical pieces.

5. Code discipline: Trim dependencies, use layers judiciously or container images when needed, and test locally with representative events.

How to Display AWS Lambda Skills on Your Resume

7. Azure Logic Apps

Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service for building automated workflows that stitch together apps, data, and services. Drag, drop, connect, and keep the glue code lean.

Why It's Important

It lets teams ship integration flows quickly—with connectors, retries, tracking, and governance baked in—so you can focus on business logic instead of plumbing.

How to Improve Azure Logic Apps Skills

Design for clarity, then tune:

1. Pick the right plan: Use Standard (single‑tenant) when you need VNET integration, private endpoints, or high throughput and local development. Consumption works well for lightweight, pay‑per‑action flows. ISE is deprecated—migrate to Standard.

2. Modularize: Break flows into reusable child workflows. Keep actions small, purposeful, and named clearly.

3. Handle faults: Scopes with run‑after, retries with backoff, terminate on fatal conditions, and compensating actions where appropriate.

4. Secure access: Managed identities, Key Vault for secrets, IP restrictions, and private networking. Encrypt in transit and at rest.

5. Optimize data ops: Trim payloads, avoid unnecessary loops, and control concurrency. Use stateless vs stateful modes thoughtfully.

6. Observe: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and Application Insights for end‑to‑end traces and metrics. Alert on real signals.

7. Ship with CI/CD: Treat workflows as code—Bicep/ARM or Terraform, source control, PR reviews, and automated promotion.

8. Manage costs: Inspect action counts, long‑running flows, and connector usage. Consolidate where it’s noisy.

How to Display Azure Logic Apps Skills on Your Resume

8. Kubernetes

Kubernetes orchestrates containers across clusters. It deploys, scales, heals, and updates your workloads so microservices behave like a single system instead of a bag of cats.

Why It's Important

It standardizes how services run and communicate. For integrations, that means predictable rollouts, traffic shaping, and reliable runtime contracts.

How to Improve Kubernetes Skills

Turn knobs that matter:

1. Automate delivery: GitOps with Argo CD or Flux, plus Helm or Kustomize. Roll forward fast, roll back faster.

2. Secure by default: RBAC, namespaces, NetworkPolicies, and Pod Security Standards. Run as non‑root, tighten capabilities, enable seccomp and read‑only roots.

3. Right‑size resources: Requests/limits, Horizontal and Vertical Pod Autoscalers, and the Cluster Autoscaler. Balance density with headroom.

4. Observe deeply: Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, logs centralized, and OpenTelemetry traces. Golden signals beat guesswork.

5. Manage traffic: Service mesh (Istio or Linkerd) for mTLS, retries, timeouts, and canary routing. Keep policies explicit.

6. Handle state: CSI drivers, PV/PVC, snapshots, and backup/restore with tools like Velero. Test restores, not just backups.

7. Plan for failure: Multi‑AZ node pools, PodDisruptionBudgets, topology spread constraints, and chaos drills.

How to Display Kubernetes Skills on Your Resume

9. Docker

Docker packages apps into containers—portable, isolated units that run the same way on a laptop or in production. Consistency wins. Speed, too.

Why It's Important

Containers slash “works on my machine” drama, make CI predictable, and dovetail with orchestration. For integrations, they shrink the blast radius and simplify promotion.

How to Improve Docker Skills

Trim, lock down, and instrument:

1. Tight Dockerfiles: Multi‑stage builds, small base images, .dockerignore, and BuildKit caching. Fewer layers, fewer surprises.

2. Security: Scan images, pin digests, sign artifacts, and run as non‑root with minimal capabilities. Keep secrets out of images.

3. Resource hygiene: Set CPU/memory limits, healthchecks, and sensible restart policies.

4. Volumes and networking: Named volumes for data, careful bind mounts, and clean network topology between services.

5. Supply chain: Generate SBOMs, capture provenance, and gate builds in CI/CD before pushing to registries.

6. Keep current: Update engines and base images regularly; patch drift is a risk you can avoid.

How to Display Docker Skills on Your Resume

10. Salesforce Integration

Salesforce Integration connects CRM data and processes to the rest of your ecosystem. Think APIs, events, bulk jobs, and secure authentication stitched into clean flows.

Why It's Important

It keeps customer truth consistent across systems, triggers timely actions, and reduces swivel‑chair work. Data gets fresher; processes move faster.

How to Improve Salesforce Integration Skills

Design with limits and scale in mind:

1. Map the landscape: Diagram objects, flows, and callouts. Spot bottlenecks and governor‑limit risks before they bite.

2. Pick the right interface: REST for transactional calls, Bulk API 2.0 for large loads, Composite for chatty sequences, and Pub/Sub or Platform Events for async patterns. Use Change Data Capture for near‑real‑time syncs.

3. Middleware when needed: Use an integration platform for transformation, retries, and governance across systems.

4. Guard rails: OAuth 2.0 with scoped access, Named Credentials, and Shield Platform Encryption where required.

5. Error handling: Centralize logs, correlation IDs, and dead‑letter paths. Respect order‑of‑execution in Salesforce.

6. Performance tests: Validate under peak loads in sandboxes. Watch per‑transaction and per‑day limits.

7. Keep pace: Track seasonal releases and adjust to API and limit changes promptly.

How to Display Salesforce Integration Skills on Your Resume

11. CI/CD Pipelines

CI/CD pipelines automate build, test, and release. They turn integration from a once‑a‑month panic into a reliable daily habit.

Why It's Important

Automation trims manual errors, shortens feedback loops, and makes deployments boring—in the best possible way.

How to Improve CI/CD Pipelines Skills

Make them fast, safe, and transparent:

1. Automate end‑to‑end: From lint to deploy. Use Jenkins, GitLab, or GitHub Actions with strict PR gates.

2. Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation, or Bicep for consistent, reviewable environments.

3. Accelerate builds: Cache dependencies, parallelize work, and break monolith pipelines into focused jobs.

4. Shift‑left security: SAST, DAST, and dependency scans inline. Block vulnerable builds. Sign artifacts.

5. Progressive delivery: Blue/green, canary, and feature flags. Rollouts with health checks and quick abort paths.

6. Observe everything: Metrics, logs, and traces wired into each stage. Chat alerts that developers actually read.

7. Supply‑chain integrity: SBOMs, provenance attestations, and immutable registries. Trust but verify.

8. Version and document: Pipelines in code, change logs, and runbooks. No mystery steps.

9. Containers first: Build once, run anywhere with Docker and Kubernetes orchestration in lower and prod.

10. Cultivate the practice: Trunk‑based development, test pyramids, and ephemeral environments for speed.

How to Display CI/CD Pipelines Skills on Your Resume

12. OAuth 2.0

OAuth 2.0 standardizes delegated authorization. Clients get scoped tokens instead of passwords, so services can act on a user’s behalf without exposing credentials.

Why It's Important

It provides safe, interoperable access across services and organizations. That’s the heartbeat of modern integrations.

How to Improve OAuth 2.0 Skills

Tighten flows and tokens, then monitor:

1. Use Authorization Code with PKCE: For public clients (SPAs, mobile), ditch implicit flows and require PKCE.

2. Follow OAuth 2.1 guidance: Consolidated best practices—safer defaults, fewer sharp edges.

3. Adopt proof‑of‑possession: mTLS for high assurance or DPoP for browser‑friendly POP tokens. Reduce token replay risk.

4. Short‑lived access, rotating refresh: Rotate refresh tokens, set strict expirations, and revoke on suspicion.

5. Scope and audience: Minimal scopes, explicit audiences, and clear consent. Don’t mint god‑tokens.

6. Keys and claims: Automate JWKS rotation, sign tokens strongly, and validate exp, aud, iss, and jti.

7. Store tokens safely: For browsers, prefer secure, httpOnly cookies. Avoid localStorage for access tokens.

8. Test and audit: Threat model your flows, pen test regularly, and log all token events for forensics.

How to Display OAuth 2.0 Skills on Your Resume