Senior Middleware Engineer / IBM MQ & Kafka Administrator

Job Title: Senior Middleware Engineer / IBM MQ & Kafka Administrator

Location: Remote

Job Summary

We are looking for a highly experienced Middleware Engineer with strong expertise in IBM MQ, IBM ACE/IIB, Apache Kafka, and WebSphere Application Server. The ideal candidate will be responsible for administering enterprise messaging platforms, supporting production environments, performing migrations, ensuring high availability, and optimizing middleware infrastructure across on-premises and cloud environments.

Required Skills

• 15 years of experience in IBM MQ Administration
• Strong experience with IBM ACE / IIB / Message Broker
• 5 years of Apache Kafka & Confluent Platform administration
• Experience with WebSphere Application Server (WAS)
• Hands-on experience with MQ clustering, RDQM, Multi-instance Queue Managers
• Strong knowledge of SSL/TLS, OAM, SASL_SSL, ACL Security
• Experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, MirrorMaker, Debezium
• Linux/AIX administration
• Experience with GCP/OpenShift/Kubernetes
• Monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Tivoli
• Scripting using Shell, Python, MQSC
• Oracle, DB2, PostgreSQL databases
• Strong troubleshooting and RCA skills
• Experience supporting 24x7 Production environments

Responsibilities

• Install, configure, administer and upgrade IBM MQ, Kafka and ACE/IIB environments.
• Manage Queue Managers, Clusters, Channels, Topics, Brokers and Message Flows.
• Configure high availability, disaster recovery and performance tuning.
• Perform middleware migrations including MQ, Kafka and ACE upgrades.
• Administer Kafka clusters, brokers, consumer groups, connectors and Schema Registry.
• Configure SSL/TLS security, user authentication and access controls.
• Monitor middleware infrastructure using Prometheus, Grafana and Splunk.
• Troubleshoot production issues, perform RCA and resolve critical incidents.
• Support application onboarding, deployment and middleware integration.
• Automate administration tasks using Shell/Python scripts.
• Collaborate with development, infrastructure and application teams during deployments.
• Maintain technical documentation and operational procedures.
• Participate in 24x7 on-call production support.

Preferred Skills

• IBM MQ Certifications
• Experience with RabbitMQ, DataPower
• Experience migrating MQ to Kafka
• Kubernetes/GKE/OpenShift exposure
• Banking, Retail or Manufacturing domain experience

Nice to Have

• Java development knowledge
• CI/CD exposure
• Cloud-native messaging architecture
• Flexera licensing management