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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Middleware Messaging Administrator

💰 $90,000 - $150,000

ITMiddlewareDevOpsInfrastructure

🎯 Role Definition

The Middleware Messaging Administrator is responsible for administering, tuning, securing and automating enterprise message broker platforms and middleware components that underpin critical applications. This hands-on role requires end-to-end ownership of messaging infrastructure — including provisioning, high availability (HA) configuration, performance tuning, patching/upgrades, incident management, capacity planning, security (TLS/PKI, RBAC), monitoring/observability, and integration support for application teams. The ideal candidate is experienced with one or more major messaging platforms (IBM MQ, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, TIBCO EMS, Solace), comfortable in Linux/Windows environments, and proficient with automation (Ansible/Terraform/Bash/Python) and cloud-native deployment patterns (containers, Kubernetes, AWS/Azure/GCP).

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Middleware Support Engineer
  • Systems Administrator (Linux/Windows)
  • Integration/Message Developer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Middleware Messaging Administrator / Lead
  • Messaging Platform Architect
  • Infrastructure or Integration Manager
  • Enterprise Integration Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer (platform focus)
  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
  • Application Integration Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own day-to-day administration and operational support for enterprise messaging platforms (IBM MQ, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, TIBCO EMS, Solace), including queue manager/topic management, broker/cluster configuration, HA/DR setup and failover testing to meet SLA and RTO/RPO targets.
  • Design and implement architecture patterns for messaging reliability and scalability, including partition strategies, replication, clustering, persistence strategies, and message retention policies in line with business requirements.
  • Lead and execute platform upgrades, patch management and version migrations for message brokers and clients, coordinating change windows, rollback plans and thorough post-upgrade validation with application teams.
  • Troubleshoot complex messaging incidents (message loss, duplicates, stuck queues, consumer lag, broker outages) root-causing issues across middleware, network, storage and application layers, and drive corrective actions until full resolution.
  • Create, maintain and enforce operational runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), runbooks for incident response, and runbook automation for common operational tasks to reduce MTTR and human error.
  • Implement and manage secure messaging practices: configure TLS/SSL, mutual authentication, PKI/certificate lifecycle, encryption in transit, and role-based access control (RBAC) for broker administration and client access.
  • Automate provisioning, configuration and deployments of messaging components using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), configuration management (Ansible, Chef), and scripting (Bash, Python), ensuring reproducible environments across dev/test/prod.
  • Monitor messaging health and performance using enterprise observability tools (Prometheus/Grafana, Splunk, ELK, Datadog, Nagios), create meaningful alerts, dashboards and capacity forecasts to proactively prevent incidents and performance degradation.
  • Manage and tune broker performance: adjust JVM/heap, consumer/producer throughput settings, disk I/O tuning, retention/persistence settings, and message batching to meet latency and throughput KPIs.
  • Develop and maintain integration patterns, client configuration guidance and best practices for application teams on JMS, AMQP, RESTful endpoints, Kafka clients, and connector usage to ensure consistent and efficient integration.
  • Provide operational support for containerized messaging deployments and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/OpenShift), including helm charts, operators (e.g., Strimzi for Kafka) and stateful set management.
  • Execute capacity planning and scalability analysis for messaging infrastructure; forecast growth, run load tests, and plan horizontal/vertical scaling to meet projected traffic and retention needs.
  • Administer user access and identity integration for messaging platforms, integrating with corporate IAM/AD/LDAP systems and implementing least-privilege access controls and audit logging.
  • Implement and test disaster recovery (DR) runbooks for messaging infrastructure, including cross-site replication, failover drills, and recovery timelines aligned with business continuity plans.
  • Collaborate closely with application developers, integration teams and product owners to onboard new services, design message schemas, troubleshoot integration issues and optimize message flows and SLAs.
  • Maintain rigorous change control documentation and approvals, liaising with release management teams to schedule and execute messaging changes with minimal disruption.
  • Conduct security reviews and vulnerability remediation for middleware components, implement hardening guidelines, and maintain compliance with internal security policies and external regulations.
  • Manage vendor relationships, license renewals and support contracts for messaging software, escalate vendor issues and coordinate enterprise support when required.
  • Maintain comprehensive documentation of topology, configuration baselines, runbooks, incident postmortems, and architecture diagrams to support knowledge transfer and audits.
  • Implement and manage connectors and integration tooling (Kafka Connect, JMS bridges, REST proxies) for bridging messaging systems to databases, file stores, and external SaaS platforms.
  • Mentor and train junior administrators and support teams on messaging operational tasks, best practices and observability to build organizational capability and resilience.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in procurement evaluations and proof-of-concept (POC) testing for new messaging or event-streaming technologies.
  • Participate in on-call rotations for after-hours incident response and post-incident reviews.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert administration experience with at least one enterprise message broker: IBM MQ, Apache Kafka (Confluent), RabbitMQ, TIBCO EMS or Solace.
  • Strong troubleshooting skills across middleware, OS (Linux/Windows), networking (TCP/IP), and storage layers.
  • Experience with message and broker protocols (JMS, AMQP, MQTT, REST, Kafka protocol) and client configuration best practices.
  • Hands-on automation and IaC experience: Ansible, Terraform, Bash, Python or similar scripting and orchestration tools.
  • Proven experience with monitoring and observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, Splunk, ELK, Datadog, Nagios) and building actionable dashboards/alerts.
  • Deep understanding of HA and DR architectures, replication, partitioning, cluster management and failover strategies.
  • Practical knowledge of TLS/SSL, PKI, certificate lifecycle management, encryption, and implementing RBAC for secure messaging.
  • Experience running messaging brokers in containerized and cloud-native environments (Docker, Kubernetes/OpenShift) and integrating with cloud services (AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs, GCP Pub/Sub).
  • Performance tuning skills, including JVM tuning (for Java-based brokers), disk/IO tuning, memory management, and throughput optimization.
  • Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) for automating deployments and configuration changes.
  • Experience with backup/recovery, retention policies, and legal/regulatory data retention requirements for message data.
  • Knowledge of integration tools and connectors (Kafka Connect, JMS bridges, enterprise service bus patterns).
  • Scripting and automation for operational runbooks, health checks, and bulk management of queues/topics.
  • Working knowledge of LDAP/AD integration, SSO, OAuth, and other identity providers for administration and client authentication.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communicator who can translate technical issues into business impact and clearly guide application teams through remediation steps.
  • Excellent problem-solver with a methodical approach to incident diagnosis, root cause analysis, and prevention.
  • Collaborative team player who can work with cross-functional teams (development, security, networking, storage, cloud) to deliver solutions.
  • Comfortable in fast-paced environments and on-call rotations with calm and professional incident leadership.
  • Detail-oriented and process-driven, with a focus on documentation, compliance, and continuous improvement.
  • Ability to mentor junior staff and deliver operational training and knowledge transfer sessions.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field.
  • Professional certifications such as IBM Certified Administrator (MQ), Confluent Certified Developer/Administrator, RHCE, or relevant cloud certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems / Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Network or Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of hands-on experience administering middleware and messaging platforms in enterprise environments.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of dedicated experience with enterprise messaging solutions (IBM MQ, Kafka, RabbitMQ or TIBCO) in production at scale.
  • Demonstrated experience in cloud and container deployments (Kubernetes, AWS/Azure/GCP), automation tooling (Ansible/Terraform), and observability/monitoring in production.
  • Prior experience participating in incident response, capacity planning, and architectural reviews for messaging platforms.
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