Senior Middleware Infrastructure Engineer

Ascendo Resources; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Ascendo Resources is seeking a Senior Middleware Infrastructure Engineer in New York or California to design, deploy, and support enterprise messaging platforms (IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka).

You will own the reliability, security, and recoverability of the firm’s messaging infrastructure across production, DR, UAT, and development environments, with strong ownership and incident-management focus.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in a related field.
• 5+ years of enterprise middleware or messaging infrastructure in production.
• Hands-on IBM MQ with high-availability configurations.
• Experience with RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka in production.
• Strong Linux/Unix administration and troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, administer, and maintain enterprise middleware platforms (IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka).
• Own middleware infrastructure across production, DR, and development environments.
• Build highly available messaging architectures meeting RTO/RPO objectives.
• Develop DR strategies, replication designs, and DR testing plans.
• Lead IBM MQ design and connectivity with external service providers.
• Configure queue managers, channels, topics, clusters, and security policies.
• Monitor performance, throughput, and health with automated alerting.
• Troubleshoot complex messaging and integration issues across environments.
• Perform capacity planning, tuning, patching, and lifecycle management.
• Automate deployment, configuration, and recovery tasks.
• Ensure compliance with cybersecurity and data-protection requirements.

Skills

IBM MQ

RabbitMQ

Apache Kafka

Linux/Unix

Python scripting

Change management

TCP/IP networking

Monitoring tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

Splunk

ELK

Job description

Title: Senior Middleware Infrastructure Engineer

Location: New York (midtown), or California office

Direct Hire

Competitive Salary + benefits

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 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.

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.
• 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 related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• 5+ 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 or Apache Kafka.
• 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 environments.
• 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.