Engineering Change Part 4: Building resilient digital solutions with AI, APIs, and embedded security
This five-part series explores how composable architecture, emerging technologies, and a collaborative engineering culture drive meaningful transformation. It’s a practical guide for organisations looking to modernise legacy systems, unlock agility, and build future-ready digital solutions.
This is part four: In it, Declan focuses on how Inviqa integrates AI, connects disparate systems through APIs and embeds security throughout the engineering lifecycle.
In a snapshot:
• AI is integrated via custom services using GPT-4 and other models
• APIs and event-driven architectures enable modular, scalable systems
• Security is proactive and continuous — from encryption to automated scanning
• CMS abstraction and API gateways support flexibility and resilience
You can read part one by clicking here, part two by clicking here, and part three by clicking here.
Embracing the modern age with AI integrations
No discussion about software engineering can ignore AI, and we’re fully embracing the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, integrating these capabilities into the solutions we build. To clarify, when we talk about AI integration, we mean adding intelligent features - like natural language understanding, recommendations, or predictive analytics - into your applications in a secure and scalable way.
For example, we incorporate large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 (ChatGPT) into digital products to enable capabilities like virtual assistants, automated content generation, or smart search. And we don’t treat AI as a black box plugin - we build custom AI agents and services, often in Python, that interface with APIs of AI platforms and embed their output into your business workflows. This could mean anything from summarising customer reviews, to generating product descriptions, to powering a chatbot that answers user queries with your company’s knowledge base.
All AI integrations are provided via well-defined APIs or microservices. This encapsulation ensures that the AI component is modular (we can swap models or providers if needed) and that it adheres to the overall system’s security and performance requirements. We also pay special attention to data privacy and security when integrating AI, ensuring that sensitive data is handled appropriately (for instance, when sending data to an AI service for processing, we consider encryption and data retention policies).
In short, if there’s an opportunity to enhance your software with machine intelligence - whether through off-the-shelf AI services or custom machine learning models - Inviqa has the experience to weave those capabilities in while demystifying the process for your team.
The power of APIs
Connecting disparate systems, services, and data sources - AI or otherwise - is at the heart of modern digital solutions - and it’s something we’ve done across a wide variety of industries and architectures. Inviqa specialises in designing integration points and APIs that are clean, resilient, and secure, allowing different parts of a technology ecosystem to work together harmoniously.
A core strength of ours is building well-documented APIs that other developers (or systems) find easy to use. Depending on the use case, we might expose services via REST endpoints (simple URLs with JSON payloads) or through a GraphQL schema (which is great when clients need flexibility in their queries). We often put an API gateway in front of our services to manage cross-cutting concerns like routing, authentication, rate limiting, and observability. This provides a centralised control point and helps enforce security and versioning best practices across all services.
For more decoupled architectures, we embrace event-driven integration patterns. Instead of one system directly calling another, systems can publish events to a message broker, and other services subscribe and react to those events. We use technologies like Apache Kafka, Amazon SNS/SQS, or RabbitMQ to enable this asynchronous communication. The benefit is increased resilience (one system can go offline and catch up later) and better scalability (services can process events at their own pace). It also reduces tight coupling — systems don’t need to know the details of each other, just the “contract” of the event format.
A practical example of this integration philosophy is the CMS abstraction layer we often implement. Rather than having a front-end website call a specific CMS directly, we introduce a middle-tier API that acts as a façade for content. The front end then just talks to this consistent API for content, and that API in turn pulls from the chosen CMS (Contentful, ContentStack, or others). If in the future you switch your CMS, you only update the integration in the middle tier - the front-end application doesn’t even need to know about the change. This kind of decoupling through integration layers is how we future-proof systems.
Whether you’re building a suite of microservices from scratch, integrating third-party SaaS services into your platform, or modernising a legacy monolith by gradually peeling off features into APIs, we can help you architect and implement the integration strategy. Paying attention to error handling, transaction management, and data consistency across systems means the final solution behaves as one coherent product, even if under the hood it’s composed of many moving parts.
Keep everything secure with a keen focus on security
Security isn’t something that should be bolted on at the end – rather, it should be woven through every stage of the engineering process.
From the earliest design discussions, we proactively consider potential threats and define appropriate mitigation strategies. This means developing clear threat models, identifying sensitive data flows, and enforcing the principle of least privilege throughout the system’s architecture.
Concretely, we implement end-to-end encryption for data in transit (using TLS everywhere) and for data at rest (using encryption keys managed by services like AWS KMS). We take a rigorous approach to dependency management, ensuring that third-party libraries and open-source components are continuously monitored for vulnerabilities. Compliance with industry regulations - including GDPR, PCI DSS, and others relevant to our clients - is treated as a baseline requirement, not an afterthought. We bake compliance checks into our process so that meeting regulatory standards is a natural outcome of our development workflow.
Our CI/CD pipelines include automated security scanning at multiple levels. We use tools such as Dependabot, Snyk, or OWASP dependency checkers to spot and fix vulnerabilities in our code dependencies.
We scan container images for known security issues before they get deployed. Infrastructure-as-code is scrutinised by tools (and human reviews) to ensure configurations are secure (for example, no accidentally open S3 buckets or overly permissive firewalls). Catching issues early - and continuously - avoids security debt piling up.
Throughout development, we maintain a mindset of security best practices. This includes habits like regular code reviews (with an eye on security implications), coding standards that avoid common pitfalls (e.g. using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection, input validation to prevent XSS, etc.), and keeping an audit trail of changes. We also conduct periodic penetration testing and invite external auditors when appropriate to validate that our security measures are effective.
Ultimately, our goal is to make secure delivery seamless. By integrating security into everything we do, we help you protect your users and data without slowing down progress. When your solution goes live, you can be confident that security has been thoroughly addressed at every level of the stack.
As you can see, integration isn’t just about connecting technologies; it’s about creating seamless, secure, and intelligent experiences for users and teams alike.
Whether weaving AI into your workflows, abstracting content layers for future-proofing, or ensuring airtight security across your stack, Inviqa has the expertise to make it all work together.
Stay tuned for the final instalment of this series, where Declan shares our day-to-day approach to getting your project off the ground.
