Senior Integration & Platform Engineer

Zurcher It; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Zurcher It is seeking a Senior Integration & Platform Engineer to design, build, and support the integration layer across banking, trading, cloud, and operational systems. You will own technical work, make sensible design decisions, and deliver reliable solutions with minimal supervision.

Responsibilities include building APIs, managing contracts and auth, and developing secure, observable middleware and Docker/Kubernetes workloads.

Qualifications

• Strong experience designing and building APIs.
• Familiar with REST, OpenAPI/Swagger, API security and versioning.
• Hands-on with messaging/middleware and cloud platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design and build APIs between internal systems, vendors, trading platforms, and cloud services.
• Manage API contracts, versioning, docs, authentication, authorization, rate limits, and monitoring.
• Build and support middleware flows for routing, transformation, validation, and enrichment.
• Contribute to Azure architecture including networking, security, monitoring, and resilience.
• Support CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure‑as‑code practices.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews and design reviews.

Skills

API design

REST APIs

Cloud platforms

Docker & Kubernetes

Tools

Azure API Management

Kong

Apigee

NGINX

Traefik

Job description

Role

We are looking for a Senior Integration & Platform Engineer to help design, build, and support the integration layer across our banking, trading, cloud, and operational systems.

This is a hands‑on senior role. The right person will be able to take ownership of technical work, understand the wider goal, make sensible design decisions, and deliver reliable solutions without needing constant supervision.

We need someone who can work across APIs, middleware, messaging, cloud platforms, containers, trading‑system integrations, and production support. Just as importantly, we need someone who brings good engineering judgement, simple where possible, structured where necessary, and always production minded.

This person will work closely with the technology lead and will be expected to become a trusted senior engineer within the team.

What we need

We need someone who can help us build systems that are,

• Modular and easy to understand
• Decoupled rather than tightly joined together
• Safe to retry, replay, and recover
• Observable in production
• Secure by design
• Well documented
• Practical support
• Built with clear ownership and clean boundaries

This role is not just about knowing tools. It is about understanding how systems should fit together and how to make them reliable in the real world.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build APIs between internal systems, vendors, trading platforms, and cloud services.
• Manage API contracts, versioning, documentation, authentication, authorisation, rate limits, and monitoring.
• Build and support middleware flows for message routing, transformation, validation, and enrichment.
• Work with Kafka, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Azure Event Hubs, or similar messaging platforms.
• Design message flows that handle retries, duplicate messages, ordering issues, replay, and audit trails.
• Support Python-based services and scripts, and work with other languages where needed.
• Help integrate trading systems, including FIX-based or market-connectivity environments.
• Build and support Docker and Kubernetes workloads.
• Contribute to Azure architecture, including networking, identity, security, monitoring, and resilience.
• Support CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure‑as‑code practices.
• Troubleshoot production issues across APIs, middleware, queues, containers, cloud services, certificates, and networking.
• Improve monitoring, logging, alerting, health checks, dashboards, and runbooks.
• Handle secrets, certificates, credentials, tokens, and sensitive data securely.
• Take part in change management, incident response, root‑cause analysis, and production reviews.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, design reviews, documentation, and practical support.
• Help define sensible engineering standards for integration, APIs, cloud, and platform services.

Required experience

• Strong experience designing and building APIs.
• Good understanding of REST, Open API / Swagger, API security, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and API versioning.
• Experience with API gateways or API management tools such as Azure API Management, Kong, Apigee, NGINX, Traefik, or similar.
• Experience with middleware, message routing, transformation, and event‑driven architecture.
• Hands‑on experience with Kafka or similar messaging / streaming platforms.
• Experience with ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Azure Event Hubs, IBM MQ, or similar.
• Practical Python development experience.
• Ability to work in other languages where needed, such as Go, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, or shell scripting.
• Good Docker and Kubernetes experience.
• Azure experience, including networking, identity, security, monitoring, and resilience.
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar.
• Familiarity with Terraform or other infrastructure‑as‑code tools.
• Strong Linux and troubleshooting skills.
• Experience supporting production systems.
• Good documentation and communication skills.
• Experience acting as a senior engineer, technical lead, or mentor.

Preferred candidate profile

• Banking, trading, brokerage, payments, fintech, or regulated financial services experience.
• FIX protocol, FIX engines, order management, execution systems, or market connectivity.
• Low‑latency, high‑availability, or real‑time systems.
• Azure Kubernetes Service.
• API security, OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, certificates, and secrets management.
• Monitoring tools such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or OpenSearch.
• SQL, reconciliation, audit trails, and operational reporting.
• Secure development and operational risk controls.
• Relevant Azure, Kubernetes, Kafka, or security certifications.