Integration Lead

You will be the Espire face of the Client account. You lead integration design and delivery on Azure APIM, own the relationship with LU’s programme team and the Salesforce SI (Creation), and coordinate the offshore team. The role is hands-on and client-facing and needs someone confident in a politically complex university environment., * Lead integration design, build and delivery across all in-scope systems (Student management system, Unit4, Kinetics Kx, Moodle and others) on Azure APIM.

• Be the primary Espire point of contact and run stakeholder relationships day to day, including the Head of Development, the solutions architect and the programme director.
• Own integration architecture decisions with LU’s solution architect, and set API design and policy standards.
• Lead discovery, backlog grooming, sprint planning and story pointing with Creation.
• Direct, review and coach the offshore Data Migration Lead, Associate Engineer and any flex developers.
• Manage scope, risk and dependencies, and escalate early.
• Should be able to take on the hands-on work
• Spot follow-on work and bring it to the Espire Client Partner.

• 10+ years in enterprise integration, with strong hands-on Azure APIM (policies, products, OAuth2/JWT, versioning, Key Vault, private networking, monitoring).
• REST and SOAP pass-through patterns, and CI/CD with Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
• Proven experience working in the UK with senior client stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication. You can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical leaders and hold a scope boundary diplomatically.
• Experience leading and mentoring distributed teams.

Desirable

• Salesforce integration experience (APIs, Education Cloud or other SI-led programmes).
• Higher education experience (SITS, Ellucian, Banner or similar).
• Exposure to data migration programmes.
• Azure certification (AZ-204, AZ-305).