Middleware Infastructure Engineer

LevelUP HCS; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

LevelUP HCS in California seeks an experienced Middleware Infrastructure Engineer to design, implement, operate, and support enterprise messaging platforms (IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka). Hybrid role: three onsite days per week in San Jose or Irvine, with remote work flexibility.

The role focuses on high availability, DR, security, and scalable middleware for trading, clearing, and settlement systems, including external partners. Strong leadership and production support skills are required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of middleware/messaging infra production experience.
• Hands-on IBM MQ: queue managers, channels, clustering, security, SSL/TLS, monitoring, HA configurations.
• Experience with at least one other messaging platform (RabbitMQ preferred).
• Experience designing high-availability, DR, failover, and business continuity solutions.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, administer, and maintain enterprise middleware platforms (IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka).
• Serve as technical owner for middleware across environments (prod, DR, UAT, dev).
• Build highly available, fault-tolerant messaging architectures meeting RTO/RPO goals.
• Develop and test DR strategies, replication, failover procedures, and DR runbooks.
• Lead middleware design and connectivity with external partners and service providers.
• Monitor performance, throughput, queue depth, and implement automated monitoring/alerts.

Skills

IBM MQ

RabbitMQ

Kafka

Linux/Unix

HA/DR design

Networking

Monitoring tools

Automation scripting

On-call/incident response

Production support

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT/Engineering

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

Work Schedule: Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite per Week- CA (SanJose or Irvine area)

Employment Type: Full-time

Compensation: $140,000 – $180,000 per year

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Middleware Infrastructure Engineer to design, implement,

operate, and support the firm’s enterprise messaging and middleware platforms, including IBM

MQ, RabbitMQ, and Apache Kafka, that support communications between internal trading,

clearing, settlement, risk, and back-office systems, as well as external financial market

infrastructures and service providers.

This role plays a key part in strategic integration initiatives involving organizations and platforms

such as DTCC, OCC, FIS Loanet, clearing partners, and other financial institutions, establishing

scalable, secure, highly available, and resilient middleware services with comprehensive high-

availability and disaster-recovery solutions.

This is a hands‑on infrastructure and production operations role requiring strong technical

ownership, disciplined change management, and the ability to support business‑critical systems

in a regulated financial‑services environment. Core mandate: own the reliability, security,

scalability, and recoverability of the firm’s messaging infrastructure across production, disaster

recovery, UAT, and development environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, administer, and maintain enterprise middleware platforms, primarily IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, and Apache Kafka.
• Serve as the subject‑matter expert and technical owner for middleware infrastructure across production, disaster‑recovery, UAT, and development environments.
• Design and implement highly available and fault‑tolerant messaging architectures that meet business continuity, recovery‑time, and recovery‑point objectives.
• Develop and maintain disaster‑recovery strategies, replication designs, failover procedures, and regular DR testing plans for middleware platforms.
• Lead IBM MQ infrastructure design and connectivity for integrations with DTCC, OCC, FIS Loanet, clearing firms, financial institutions, and other external service providers.
• Configure and manage queue managers, queues, channels, topics, clusters, listeners, message routing, security policies, certificates, and access controls.
• Monitor middleware performance, message throughput, queue depth, consumer lag, connectivity, storage utilization, and overall platform health, with automated monitoring and alerting for operational exceptions.
• Troubleshoot complex messaging, connectivity, performance, authentication, and application‑integration issues across distributed environments.
• Perform middleware capacity planning, performance tuning, patching, version upgrades, vulnerability remediation, and lifecycle management.
• Develop automation for deployment, configuration management, monitoring, recovery, and routine operational activities.
• Partner with application development, database, network, cybersecurity, SRE, DevOps, trade support, and business teams to deliver end‑to‑end integration solutions.
• Participate in architecture reviews and provide technical guidance on messaging patterns, reliability, scalability, message persistence, ordering, and delivery guarantees.
• Define and enforce middleware infrastructure standards, naming conventions, security requirements, logging practices, and operational controls.
• Prepare and maintain architecture diagrams, technical specifications, configuration documentation, operating procedures, recovery runbooks, and support playbooks.
• Support change‑management, incident‑management, problem‑management, and root‑cause‑analysis processes.
• Participate in production releases, scheduled maintenance, disaster‑recovery exercises, and critical system integration testing.
• Provide production support and participate in an on‑call rotation for business‑critical middleware services.
• Support internal and external audits by providing system documentation, access records, change evidence, configuration standards, and operational controls.
• Ensure middleware platforms comply with the firm’s cybersecurity, data‑protection, regulatory, and technology‑risk‑management requirements.

Required / Core Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Five or more years of experience administering enterprise middleware or messaging infrastructure in production environments.
• Strong hands‑on experience with IBM MQ, including queue managers, channels, clustering, security, SSL/TLS, monitoring, troubleshooting, and high‑availability configurations.
• Practical experience with at least one additional messaging platform, preferably RabbitMQ
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing high‑availability, disaster‑recovery, failover, and business‑continuity solutions.
• Strong Linux or Unix system‑administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Experience supporting middleware across distributed, hybrid‑cloud, or multi‑data‑center
• Solid understanding of TCP/IP networking, DNS, firewalls, load balancing, certificates, encryption, and secure connectivity.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK, or comparable platforms.
• Experience with scripting or automation using Python, Shell, Ansible, Terraform, or similar technologies.
• Strong knowledge of production‑support disciplines, including incident response, change control, root‑cause analysis, capacity planning, and operational documentation.
• Ability to independently diagnose complex infrastructure and application‑integration issues.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with technical teams, vendors, business stakeholders, and external financial institutions.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Experience working in a broker‑dealer, clearing firm, bank, exchange, financial technology company, or other regulated financial institution.
• Experience supporting integrations with DTCC, OCC, FIS Loanet, clearing organizations, custodians, or securities‑market infrastructure providers.
• Knowledge of securities trading, clearing, settlement, stock lending, corporate actions, or back‑office processing.
• Experience deploying and supporting middleware infrastructure in AWS or another major public‑cloud environment.
• Experience with IBM MQ multi‑instance queue managers, MQ clustering, replicated data queue managers, or equivalent HA/DR technologies.
• Experience with Kafka architecture, brokers, topics, partitions, replication, consumer groups, schema management, and Kafka Connect.
• Experience with RabbitMQ clustering, quorum queues, federation, shovel, message acknowledgments, and delivery controls.
• Familiarity with container platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience implementing infrastructure‑as‑code, automated deployment pipelines, and configuration‑management controls.
• Familiarity with regulatory requirements, cybersecurity controls, audit evidence, and technology‑risk‑management practices applicable to financial institutions.
• Relevant certifications in IBM MQ, Kafka, AWS, Linux, cloud infrastructure, or