Senior Application Support Engineer (Integration & Middleware

Job Title: L2 Application Support Engineer (Integration & Middleware)

Core Stack: IBM CP4I (ACE, MQ, API Connect), Spring Boot, Red Hat OpenShift.

1. Role Objective

The Integration Support is responsible for the health and reliability of the enterprise middleware layer. the L2 engineers to manage complex data flows between systems, ensuring that Spring Boot services and IBM CP4I components (MQ, ACE, APIC) are performant, secure, and highly available.

2. Strategic Technical Leadership

• End-to-End Traceability: tracing transaction flows from the API Gateway (API Connect) through the Enterprise Service Bus (ACE) to the backend Microservices (Spring Boot).
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Spearhead deep-dive investigations into middleware failures, such as message losses in MQ, synchronization errors in ACE, or JVM crashes in Spring Boot.
• Platform Governance: Oversee the stability of integration components running on Red Hat OpenShift, ensuring optimal resource (CPU/Memory) allocation and pod scaling.
• Security Enforcement: Manage and troubleshoot security protocols, including Mutual TLS (mTLS), OAuth2, and JWE/JWS within the integration layer.

3. Detailed Technical Responsibilities

A. IBM Cloud Pak for Integration (CP4I)

• App Connect Enterprise (ACE): Troubleshoot message flows, ESQL logic errors, and adapter connectivity issues (SAP, Database, File).
• IBM MQ: Manage queue managers, resolve channel retries, and investigate dead-letter queues or message persistence issues.
• API Connect: Resolve issues related to API definitions, security policies, and Gateway (DataPower) latency.

B. Backend Microservices (Spring Boot)

• Performance Tuning: Analyze JVM thread dumps and heap dumps to resolve memory leaks or high CPU utilization in microservices.
• Connectivity Debugging: Troubleshoot Spring Boot integration with databases (JPA/Hibernate) and external messaging systems (JMS/Kafka).
• Log Aggregation: Utilize ELK/Splunk to correlate logs across multiple microservices to identify points of failure in a distributed architecture.

4. Technical Skill Set

• Integration Platforms: Mastery of IBM CP4I (specifically ACE, MQ, and API Connect).
• Development Frameworks: Advanced knowledge of Java and Spring Boot (Spring Integration, Spring Cloud).
• Containerization: Expert-level proficiency in Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes.
• Protocols & Standards: Expert understanding of REST, SOAP, JSON, XML, AMQP, and MQTT.
• Monitoring Tools: Hands-on experience with IBM Instana, Dynatrace, or Prometheus/Grafana.

5. Qualifications

• Experience: 5+ years in Middleware or Integration Support
• Currently residing in KSA
• Complex Problem Solving: Ability to debug asynchronous communication patterns and distributed transactions.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Certifications (Preferred): IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Specialist, Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration.

6. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Integration Uptime: Achieving 99.99% availability for critical middleware components.
• L2 Resolution Rate: Maximizing the number of integration issues resolved without escalation to L3 Engineering.
• MTTR: Reducing the time taken to identify and fix failures in the message delivery pipeline.