Sr Middleware Support Admin

Rotational shift between morning/afternoon/night shifts.

Job Summary

This senior level contributor is primarily responsible for leading a team to provide operational support of enterprise messaging middleware systems, including IBM ACE and IBM MQ. This technical team leader will ensure that the platform systems are monitored to meet expected SLAs for performance and availability, systems are kept current with software updates and with maintenance, troubleshoot and resolve complex technical problems, implement preventive fixes and process changes, and deploy application interfaces and related changes.

Essential Responsibilities

• Develop strong familiarity with the enterprise messaging middleware platforms, awareness of the critical business workflows that are processed in the various interfaces, and understanding of L2 level actions that may be used to keep operations flowing smoothly (restarting processes, clearing queues, etc).
• Ensure processes are documented with SOPs.
• Assign to team members and then monitor progress of incoming requests to perform routine tasks for customer application teams and developers, such as deploying message flow code, modifying middleware server configuration, restarting services, renewing and deploying TLS certificates.
• Guide and assist other team members through production support processes such as incident management, problem management and root cause analysis, and change enablement practices, leveraging the service management system.
• Respond to technical incidents and perform troubleshooting of complex problems within the application runtime environment on the messaging middleware servers, such as checking system logs, looking for down or hung processes, confirming correct configurations, and using problem solving techniques, identify and perform actions needed to restore operational service to the system, and then report results back to the customer reporting the problem.
• For high-impact or repetitive problems, perform root cause analysis and recommend a prevention plan.
• Ensure that 24x7 monitoring is in place to identify and alert when performance or availability thresholds are triggered; develop methods to monitor system performance and take proactive, corrective measure to prevent customer downtime or outages.
• Work with members of the team to assign tasks for, and complete preventive maintenance activities such as applying software updates to the middleware stack, testing system recovery procedures, and as part of lifecycle management, support the migration of the middleware and application environment to new servers.
• Participate in activities to build and support production and pre-production IBM App Connect Enterprise (Message Broker), IBM MQ.
• When required, submit and track requests for dependency tasks to infrastructure, security, or other technical teams through service management system.
• Utilize process automation using DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Ansible, Urban Code Deploy.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, CIS, or related field and Minimum Five (5) years experience in software development or a related field.
• In lieu of a Bachelor's degree, equivalent work experience of six (3) yrs may be substituted, for a total of eight (8) years experience.

Additional Requirements

• Two (2) years experience working as a developer or system admin for one or more of these messaging server platforms: IBM App Connect Enterprise, IBM Integration Bus, IBM MQ
• Two (2) years experience with Unix/Linux systems and familiarity with basic system admin commands

Preferred Qualifications

• One (1) year experience implementing automations with DevOps tools (Jenkins, Ansible, Urban Code Deploy are examples)
• One (1) year experience with troubleshooting complex systems using problem solving techniques
• One (1) year experience developing programs or scripts to automate common tasks, using a language such as Python, Perl, or Unix shell
• One (1) year experience working in a technical leadership role on a team