IBM MQ and Solace Technology Lead SRE Professional

**Job Title: IBM MQ and Solace Technology Lead / SRE Professional** **Location:** Phoenix, AZ (Onsite, 4 days a week office, one day remote) **Number of Positions:** 2 **Job Description:** We are seeking an IBM MQ and Solace Technology Lead / SRE Professional with strong enterprise messaging platform administration, production support, and infrastructure operations experience. As a technical lead, you will be responsible for managing and supporting enterprise messaging platforms, handling production incidents, leading outage calls, coordinating with application and infrastructure teams, mentoring team members, supporting change management, and ensuring reliable message delivery across business-critical applications. **Key Responsibilities:** - Configure, administer, upgrade, and maintain IBM MQ infrastructure across Linux, Windows, UNIX, AIX, and related enterprise platforms. - Create and manage queue managers, local/remote/transmission queues, channels, listeners, clusters, and other MQ objects across environments. - Configure and manage Solace PubSub+ Event Brokers, message VPNs, queues, topics, ACLs, client profiles, and messaging services. - Support event-driven architecture, asynchronous integrations, publish/subscribe messaging, high availability, replication, and failover mechanisms. - Implement and maintain messaging security controls including SSL/TLS, authentication, authorization, encryption, LDAP integration, and access governance. - Monitor queue depth, channel status, broker performance, message flows, system health, logs, and platform alerts using Splunk, Dynatrace, Grafana, Prometheus, and related tools. - Troubleshoot production issues related to MQ/Solace connectivity, message latency, message delivery failures, authentication, authorization, certificates, and application integration. - Lead incident response, join outage bridges, perform triage, document updates, coordinate service restoration, and drive root cause analysis and corrective actions. - Perform capacity planning, patching, disaster recovery testing, environment readiness checks, and production readiness reviews for messaging platforms. - Work with application and engineering teams to optimize message flows, resolve integration issues, validate configuration, and ensure reliable communication between services. - Support change management by reviewing planned changes, assessing risks, coordinating implementation windows, and ensuring proper production validation. - Create and maintain configuration documentation, runbooks, SOPs, implementation notes, troubleshooting guides, and operational knowledge articles. - Lead shift support activities, mentor junior resources, manage backup plans, coordinate leaves, and ensure smooth onsite/offshore delivery coverage. - Handle stakeholder communication, scribe outage calls, respond to client and business queries, and provide timely operational status updates. - Identify automation and continuous improvement opportunities across messaging operations, monitoring, deployment, and support processes. ** Qualifications:** - Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent from an accredited institution. Will also consider three years of progressive experience in the specialty in lieu of every year of education. - At least 4 years of relevant Information Technology experience with hands-on exposure to IBM MQ, Solace PubSub+, middleware administration, production support, or infrastructure operations. ** Skillset:** - **Platforms:** Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10/7.x, Windows 10 Enterprise, Windows Server 2012 R2/2016, UNIX, IBM Servers, AIX 7, Red Hat OpenShift / ECP, and enterprise infrastructure environments. - **Messaging Technologies:** IBM MQ Administration v8/v9+, Solace PubSub+ Administration, Queue Managers, Queues, Channels, Listeners, MQ Clusters, Message VPNs, Topics, ACLs, Client Profiles, Messaging Services, Publish/Subscribe architecture, JMS, AMQP, MQTT, and REST messaging APIs. - **Administration and Scripting:** UNIX shell scripting, configuration management, log analysis, operational automation, SSL/TLS certificate handling, authentication, authorization, encryption, and access control management. - **Tools:** ServiceNow, Splunk Enterprise, Splunk ITSI, Splunk Forwarder, Dynatrace OneAgent, Grafana, Prometheus, Kibana, AppDynamics, Wireshark, SOAP UI, JIRA, Confluence, Jenkins, XLR pipeline, Ansible, Maven, NGINX, Apache Web Server, F5, AppViewX, HP SiteScope, CA Wily Introscope, IBM WebSphere Application Server, VMware vCenter, and other enterprise monitoring/middleware tools. - **Big-Data / Monitoring Analytics Platform:** Splunk, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Kibana, Grafana, AppDynamics, Agile methodology, change management, and SDLC for project delivery and production support. **Preferred Qualifications:** - At least 5 years of experience supporting enterprise middleware, messaging platforms, production operations, or infrastructure administration. - Experience designing, configuring, and managing IBM MQ and Solace environments across development, testing, and production landscapes. - Experience creating queue managers, queues, channels, listeners, topics, VPNs, ACL profiles, client profiles, and messaging services with appropriate security controls. - Experience implementing high availability, replication, failover, disaster recovery, patching, capacity planning, and operational readiness practices for messaging platforms. - Experience troubleshooting connectivity, latency, message delivery, broker performance, queue depth, channel status, authentication, authorization, and SSL/TLS related issues. - Ability to collaborate with developers, infrastructure, network, security, and application teams to resolve integration issues and maintain reliable messaging services. - Ability to create clear operational documentation, SOPs, runbooks, RCA summaries, configuration references, and troubleshooting guides. - Experience in production support, change management, incident management, release coordination, and managing onsite/offshore team activities. - Preferred certifications include IBM MQ Administrator Certification, Solace Certified Administrator, Red Hat Linux Certification, and Cloud Certifications such as Azure, AWS, or GCP.