Lead Infrastructure Engineer - Middleware Integration

Outstanding contract opportunity! A well-known Financial Services Company is looking for an Infrastructure Engineer - Middleware Integration in Charlotte, NC, Irving, TX, Phoenix, AZ, Des Moines, IA, Minneapolis, MN or Iselin, NJ (hybrid).

Our client is seeking a Lead Infrastructure Engineer - Middleware Integration to join the Enterprise Middleware Integration team. This team enables the development of critical products that support the Technology organization's transformation initiatives. The role is responsible for building, engineering, and evangelizing Middleware, Streaming, and Messaging products across the enterprise.

Contract Duration: 12+ Months

Required Skills & Experience

• 8+ years of Technology Infrastructure Engineering and Solutions experience (or equivalent combination of experience, education, training, or military service)
• 4+ years of hands-on, large-scale experience with Integration Middleware, including:
  • IBM MQ (WebSphere MQ)
  • IBM Message Broker / ACE / IIB
  • Kafka
  • Solace
• IBM MQ Administration, including:
  • Build, installation, configuration, patching, compliance, and troubleshooting
  • MQ Queue Manager configuration and MQ Cluster troubleshooting
  • Creation and maintenance of MQ objects (Queue Managers, Queues, Channels, Listeners, Topics)
• Strong experience supporting Middleware production environments on Linux and Windows
• Experience with MQ monitoring tools (e.g., IR360)

Desired Skills & Experience

• Experience supporting large, enterprise-scale environments
• Experience with IBM MQ Appliance
• Knowledge of compliance and risk management requirements
• Experience supporting key risk initiatives
• IBM MQ experience on Mainframe/Midrange platforms (z/OS, zLinux, AIX)
• Familiarity with Incident Management systems (ServiceNow preferred)
• Experience monitoring alerts, batch failures, and ServiceNow queues
• Experience with Ansible, UDeploy, and deployment automation tools
• Strong troubleshooting experience across job failures and batch processing
• Linux administration fundamentals and shell commands
• Basic networking knowledge, including load balancers (F5, AVI)
• Understanding of network topology
• Experience troubleshooting basic Java application server issues

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead and implement complex infrastructure and middleware upgrades
• Analyze business, application, and technical infrastructure requirements
• Design, code, test, debug, and document solutions using Agile development practices
• Lead and contribute to high-level technical initiatives spanning both technology and business
• Design, develop, test, and document complex infrastructure systems and solutions
• Create and maintain technical documentation, operational policies, and procedures
• Utilize monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Grafana, Splunk) to support application and operations teams
• Contribute to testing across business, application, and infrastructure layers
• Direct daily risk and control processes with a focus on compliance, policies, and procedures
• Develop long-term remediation strategies to resolve recurring issues
• Collaborate with peers, leadership, and cross-functional teams to resolve issues and achieve objectives
• Handle outage calls, triage issues efficiently, and drive resolution