Integration Architect

Integration Architect - London / Birmingham (Hybrid working) Full-Time / Permanent

Competitive salary + bonus and excellent benefits including healthcare, wellbeing support, 27 days' annual leave plus bank holidays, life insurance and more.

We are looking for a technically exceptional Integration Architect to join the Digital & Technology team at Compass Group UK & Ireland. You'll combine strong judgement with a practical, delivery-minded approach - evaluating platforms and approaches, shaping integration patterns that engineers can build to, and driving targeted modernisation where it will reduce risk and improve reliability. This is a role for someone who is comfortable producing technically rigorous architecture, and able to explain options, trade-offs, and roadmaps to senior stakeholders when required.

If you are the kind of Integration Architect who is energised by complexity, motivated by the opportunity to build something that genuinely matters, and ready to leave a lasting mark on how a large organisation connects and operates - this is the role for you.

About Compass Group UK & Ireland

We're part of FTSE 100 Compass Group PLC, a global leader in food services. Our colleagues serve customers every day across thousands of locations, from schools and hospitals to stadiums, offices and visitor attractions. Digital & Technology (D&T) is around 260 people and is driving the business's AI First strategy.

Integration Architect - The role

Integration is the connective tissue of our technology estate. It influences how quickly we can deliver change, how reliably our systems operate, and how effectively our platforms - from SAP to e-commerce to our data estate - work together to serve the business and our customers. Getting this right is a key enabler for delivery and operational performance.

The Integration Architect is a key domain expert within Digital & Technology, sitting at the intersection of architecture and engineering. The role partners closely with delivery teams building products, the architecture community shaping technology direction, and programmes across commerce, data, and SAP to ensure integrations are designed consistently, securely, and in a way that will scale.

Key Responsibilities

Integration Strategy and Platform Direction

• Lead the development of the integration strategy and target-state direction, working with Enterprise Architecture, Engineering, and programmes to establish a clear vision for how systems connect, share data, and enable business capabilities.
• Lead or support the evaluation of integration platforms and tooling (API management, event streaming, iPaaS, middleware), providing clear recommendations, reference architectures, and evidence to inform investment decisions.
• Assess the current integration estate with technical rigour, identify the highest-priority areas of fragility, duplication, and risk, and develop a phased modernisation roadmap with clear outcomes at each stage.
• Define and maintain the integration methodology - the patterns, standards, and decision frameworks that teams can use to design and deliver integrations consistently and well.
• Stay ahead of the curve on emerging integration technologies and approaches, ensuring the organisation's strategy reflects industry direction and does not accumulate avoidable technical debt.

Technical Architecture and Hands-On Design

• Produce detailed, technically credible integration architectures across all integration domains - SAP and ERP connectivity, e-commerce and digital channels, mobile platforms, data pipeline and analytics integrations, and third-party SaaS and partner systems.
• Lead technical spikes and proof-of-concept work to validate architectural approaches, evaluate tooling options, and de-risk delivery - getting hands-on where the situation demands it.
• Define and curate the integration patterns library, covering REST and GraphQL APIs, event-driven and pub/sub patterns, webhooks, message queuing and streaming (e.g. Apache Kafka, Amazon SQS/SNS, Amazon EventBridge), batch and near-real-time data exchange, and EDI.
• Architect API gateway strategy - including lifecycle management, versioning, consumer experience, and throttling - ensuring APIs are treated as products, not just interfaces (e.g. Amazon API Gateway, Kong, or equivalent).
• Ensure all integration designs address non-functional requirements: resilience, observability, scalability, fault tolerance, and operational manageability.
• Define patterns for real-time and near-real-time data flows, event-to-data pipelines, and data replication - ensuring integration and data architecture are coherent and complementary rather than misaligned.

Security, Key Management and Compliance

• Embed security as a first principle in all integration design - covering authentication and authorisation (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, mutual TLS), transport encryption, and consumer access control.
• Define and govern standards for secrets management, API key lifecycle, certificate rotation, and integration endpoint security (e.g. AWS Secrets Manager, AWS KMS), working in close partnership with Information Security.
• Identify and actively mitigate integration-level security risks including data leakage, misconfigured access, and injection vulnerabilities across the integration estate.

Standards, Governance and Delivery Enablement

• Provide integration architecture oversight through governance and assurance, helping ensure integration designs (in-house and vendor-delivered) align to agreed standards, patterns, and non-functional expectations.
• Act as a recognised integration domain expert in architecture forums, design reviews, and programme assurance - providing clear, technically grounded guidance, options, and recommendations.
• Work closely with the Enterprise Architect, Solution Architects, and engineering and delivery teams to ensure integration strategy is understood, applied, and continuously improved through delivery feedback.
• Build integration capability across the wider engineering community through documentation, design review participation, and direct technical engagement.

Key Challenges

An integration estate built up over many years through largely project-driven, point-to-point decisions - requiring both strategic clarity and the technical credibility to drive meaningful consolidation and modernisation. A complex, multi-domain landscape spanning SAP, e-commerce, data platforms, mobile, and logistics - each with distinct integration needs, existing tooling, and delivery teams.High reliance on outsourced d