Integrations Tech Lead - Malta

We are seeking an experienced and hands-on Integrations Tech Lead to own the technical design, delivery and operational excellence of our integration layer and API ecosystem. This role combines technical leadership, systems architecture and active development: you will drive integration strategy, define standards, mentor engineers and work closely with Product, QA and DevOps to deliver robust, scalable integrations between internal platforms and third-party providers.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture: Own the architecture and technical roadmap for integration services and APIs, ensuring scalability, security, observability and maintainability.

Integration Design & Development: Design, implement and maintain RESTful and event-driven integration patterns, connectors, middleware services and transformation layers to support external suppliers, game providers and internal consumers.

Standards & Best Practice: Define and enforce integration standards, API contracts, versioning strategies, authentication/authorisation approaches and data mapping guidelines.

Operational Reliability: Ensure high availability and resilience of integration services, implement monitoring, alerting and tracing, and lead incident response for integration-related issues.

Code Quality & Review: Perform and drive thorough code reviews, promote clean code, testing and automation, and ensure delivery meets security and performance requirements.

Collaboration & Stakeholder Management: Work closely with Product Owners, Business Analysts, QA, DevOps and third-party partners to capture requirements, plan releases and coordinate onboarding of new integrations.

Mentoring & Team Enablement: Lead and mentor integration engineers, support technical growth, assist with task breakdown, estimation and career development.

Documentation: Maintain clear technical documentation for integration architectures, API specifications, onboarding guides and runbooks.

Qualifications & Skills

Proven experience (typically 6+ years) in backend or integration engineering and at least 2-3 years in a technical lead role.

Strong expertise building and operating integrations, APIs and middleware using modern technologies (Java, Kotlin, Node.js or similar).

Hands-on experience with RESTful APIs, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ or equivalent) and event-driven architectures.

Solid understanding of authentication and authorisation protocols (OAuth2, JWT, mTLS) and security best practices for integrations.

Familiarity with Kubernetes, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP or Azure), CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code principles.

Experience with API gateways, rate limiting, schema validation and contract testing.

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions.

Excellent communication skills; able to explain technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Demonstrable sense of ownership, accountability and commitment to quality and operational excellence.