HCL Portal (WebSphere Portal) Technical Lead

Title: HCL Portal (WebSphere Portal) Technical Lead

Location: remote - Long term contract

Job Details

Role Description

• As a Tech Lead for HCL Portal (WebSphere Portal), you will be responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the maintenance and administration of enterprise portal solutions.
• This role involves a combination of deep portal expertise, team leadership, project management skills, and collaboration with cross-functional teams, along with excellent communication skills.
• You will architect/maintain/support scalable portlet solutions, drive CI/CD adoption, and ensure security and accessibility compliance across all portal deliverables.

Required Skills

Portal Architecture & Administration

• Proven experience architecting and administering HCL Portal / WebSphere Portal in enterprise environments.
• Strong understanding of portal cluster topologies, deployment manager, node agents, and virtual portals.
• Expertise in portal administration: portlet deployment, XML Access scripts, portal configuration, and environment management.

LDAP / SSO Integration, OpenID Connect (Ping) & SSL/TLS Certificate Management

• Hands-on experience integrating LDAP (IBM Security Directory Server / Active Directory) with WebSphere Portal for user registry, group management, and role mapping.
• Practical knowledge of Single Sign-On (SSO) implementation using OpenID Connect (OIDC) with Ping Identity (PingFederate / PingAccess / PingOne).
• Experience managing SSL/TLS certificates including procurement, deployment, renewal, and keystore/trust store configuration across portal nodes.

Portlet Development (JSR-286), Inter-Portlet Communication & Personalization

• Strong proficiency in JSR-286 portlet development, including all lifecycle phases: init, render, action, event, and resource.
• Experience implementing inter-portlet communication (IPC) using public render parameters and portal events.
• Knowledge of portal personalization engines and rules-based content targeting for user-segment-based delivery.

Portlets & Portal Technologies

• Deep expertise in JSR-286 Portlet API and full portlet lifecycle management.
• Integration with WCM (Web Content Manager) and backend services via REST/JSON APIs.
• Security hardening: CSRF token management and XSS output encoding within portlet development.
• Accessibility compliance: demonstrated understanding and application of WCAG 2.1 guidelines in portlet UIs.

CI/CD for Portlet Builds (Maven / Gradle)

• Experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines using Maven and/or Gradle for portlet artifact builds and deployments.
• Familiarity with Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps for portlet deployment automation and environment promotion.
• Understanding of portal XML Access and ConfigEngine scripts for automated configuration management.

Nice-to-have Skills

• React & Modern JS Frameworks for Portlet UI
• Experience embedding React (or Angular/Vue) applications within portlet render phases, including module bundling (Webpack/Vite), client-side routing, and lazy loading.
• Familiarity with WCAG-compliant accessible component libraries such as Carbon Design System or Material UI.
• Theme/Skin Customization, Layout Templates & URL Mapping
• Experience developing custom HCL Portal themes and skins using the theme optimization framework.
• Knowledge of portal layout templates and experience configuring URL mappings, vanity URLs, and friendly URL patterns.
• Performance Tuning, Caching Strategies & Log/Trace Troubleshooting
• Hands-on experience with dynamic caching and Edge Side Includes (ESI) in WebSphere Portal.
• Proficiency in reading and interpreting WAS/Portal trace logs and FFDC logs for issue resolution.
• Experience with JVM tuning (heap sizes, policies) and JDBC/connection pool configuration for portal performance optimization.