Middleware Integration Specialist & SRE

Requirement:
Non-Financial Risk Technologies (NFR Tech) at our Company is looking to onboard a Middleware Integration Specialist & SRE for their Application and Data Engineering (ADE) team.

ADE provides application and platform engineering conforming to Company’s security blueprints with a focus on performance, reliability, and scalability. By understanding the technical requirements from application owners and the business, ADE participates in the technical evaluation of vendors and vendor/open-source technologies and conducts proof of concepts, software packaging, deployment, and automation of middleware products.

The team also supports strategic initiatives like cloud migration, application modernization, and SRE.

To succeed in this role, this team partners closely with central technology teams like Infrastructure, Security, Network, Database, and procurement to design and deliver solutions. The team leverages a variety of tools for platform design and application troubleshooting as they also provide elevated level 4 production support to the application operations teams.

Responsibilities:
The successful candidate will:
· Apply technical skills to design, build and automate middleware platforms both on-premises and cloud.
· Partner with other groups in the Company such as Enterprise Infrastructure, MIS, Networking, Security, Storage, Database and Data Center teams to roll out middleware platforms successfully as per best practices.
· Coordinate signoffs for non-functional requirement testing with development and business teams.
· Maintain a 360-degree view of applications and their underlying middleware and infrastructure components.
· Produce reusable infrastructure and middleware designs patterns for future reference and refresh existing ones on a regular basis.
· Support vendor / vendor technology onboarding following Company’s best practices and security blueprints.
· Adopt, build and rollout new technology stacks for NFRT for cloud-based and on-prem applications.
· Automate daily support functions, improve system stability, support hygiene initiatives and deliver innovation that creates efficiency and consistency.

Required Skills:
· Strong infrastructure knowledge in Linux / Unix, Storage and Networking
· Hands-on experience with load balancers, web servers (Apache / Nginx), application servers (Tomcat) to include application integration, configuration, and troubleshooting.
· Expert level scripting skills using Python (mandatory) and Shell
· Familiar with IT Automation & Config Management tools (Ansible / Helm)
· Experience with source control and continuous integration / continuous delivery pipelines (Jenkins, Artifactory, Flux)
· Familiar with security hardening concepts for hosting applications or middleware, including transport encryption, modern single-sign on authentication and authorization mechanisms
· Basic operational knowledge of RDBMS and SQL.
· Hands-on experience on Cloud platforms (Azure or AWS), Docker/Podman containers, Kubernetes / OpenShift
· Prior experience managing large web-based n-tier applications in secure environments on cloud

Desired / Nice to have skills:
· Familiarity with Kafka, Redis, Airflow
· Exposure and experience in open-source Observability tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry and Loki)
· Identity management protocols like OIDC / OAuth, SAML, LDAP integration
· Exposure to Big Data platforms like Hadoop / ELK Stack
· Capacity planning and performance tuning of applications and middleware platforms
· A system architecture / developer work experience

Experience:
· 7 plus years in a similar role of hands-on application / middleware specialist.
· Prior experience of working in a global financial organization is an advantage