L3 Middleware Support Expert / Architect

Job Description: L3 Middleware Support Expert / Architect## The Role

The L3 Middleware Support Expert / Architect is the highest technical authority within the managed services support chain for the middleware platform. This role owns complex incident resolution, root cause analysis, architecture decision-making, capacity planning, and the strategic migration of legacy middleware workloads to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

The L3 Architect serves as the definitive technical escalation point for all L1/L2 engineers and interfaces directly with application teams, platform engineering, and vendor support organizations.

## Key Responsibilities### Escalation & Complex Incident Resolution

• Incident Ownership: Serve as the definitive escalation authority for all P1/P2 incidents across the enterprise middleware stack.
• Crisis Management: Lead war-room bridge calls; drive structured incident resolution with clear action plans and consistent stakeholder communication.
• Deep-Dive RCA: Perform comprehensive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) using heap dump analysis, GC log review, network traces, and vendor diagnostic tools.
• Vendor Management: Engage IBM and Oracle vendor support (PMR/SR) with detailed diagnostic packages; drive open cases to rapid resolution.
• Reporting: Author comprehensive Post-Incident Reports (PIR) featuring permanent corrective actions, timeline analysis, and SLA impact assessments.
• Enablement: Establish and maintain the escalation runbook library; coach L1/L2 teams on escalation procedures and decision trees.

### Technology-Specific Architecture & SupportIBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS)

• Design and maintain WAS Network Deployment cell topologies, high-availability configurations, and session persistence strategies.
• Perform advanced JVM tuning: GC policy selection (gencon, balanced), heap sizing, compressed references, and JIT optimization.
• Diagnose complex class loader conflicts, memory leaks, thread contention, and connection pool exhaustion using IBM GCMV, IBM Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer, and Eclipse MAT.
• Design and oversee WAS to WebSphere Liberty or OpenShift migration blueprints.
• Implement and validate security configurations: LDAP, RACF, SSL/TLS mutual authentication, JAAS, and application security policies.
• Provide architecture guidance for WAS ND clustering, HTTP server (IHS) plug-in configuration, and WebSphere eXtreme Scale (WXS).

IBM MQ

• Design IBM MQ cluster architectures including full repository, partial repository, and gateway queue managers.
• Architect MQ high-availability solutions: MQ multi-instance queue managers (RDQM), MQ HA with NFS/GPFS, and MQ on OpenShift.
• Troubleshoot MQ cluster routing, message affinity issues, back-out threshold failures, and channel security (TLS/CHLAUTH).
• Implement MQ Advanced Message Security (AMS), TLS mutual authentication, and channel authentication rules.
• Diagnose and resolve complex MQ performance bottlenecks: disk I/O saturation, channel congestion, and large message handling.
• Architect migration paths from on-premises MQ to IBM MQ on OpenShift or IBM Cloud Pak for Integration.

IBM API Connect

• Architect IBM API Connect v10 deployments on OpenShift: Management, Analytics, Developer Portal, and Gateway subsystem sizing and HA design.
• Design API lifecycle governance: version management, rate limiting, OAuth 2.0 / OIDC security schemes, and API product publishing.
• Troubleshoot complex API policy assembly failures, GatewayScript errors, and DataPower integration issues.
• Implement API observability: custom analytics dashboards, alerting, and correlation with backend service traces.
• Lead API Connect cluster upgrades, certificate rotation procedures, and disaster recovery testing.

IBM DataPower Gateway

• Architect multi-domain DataPower deployments for DMZ, internal, and B2B integration patterns.
• Design and troubleshoot complex XSLT transformations, GatewayScript policies, Web Service Proxies, and Multi-Protocol Gateways (MPGW).
• Implement advanced security policies: XML threat protection, schema validation, WS-Security, and OAuth token enforcement.
• Diagnose performance bottlenecks using DataPower probe, latency graphs, and IBM Support Advisor.
• Architect DataPower Gateway Operator deployments on OpenShift; manage DataPowerService CR lifecycle.

IBM Event Streams (Apache Kafka)

• Architect IBM Event Streams (Kafka) cluster topologies for throughput, fault tolerance, and geo-replication.
• Tune broker configurations: replication factor, ISR settings, log retention, consumer group rebalancing, and compaction policies.
• Diagnose consumer lag escalations, partition leadership imbalances, under-replicated partition alerts, and ZooKeeper/KRaft quorum issues.
• Design Kafka Connect pipelines, Schema Registry integration, and MirrorMaker 2 replication for Disaster Recovery (DR).
• Implement Kafka security: mTLS, SASL/SCRAM, topic-level ACLs, and network policies on OpenShift.
• Lead Event Streams operator upgrades, topic schema migrations, and Kafka version upgrades on OpenShift.

Oracle WebLogic & Service Bus

• Architect Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) domains: Administration Server, Managed Servers, Cluster configuration, and Node Manager HA.
• Design and tune WebLogic JVM parameters: heap, metaspace, GC policy, and Work Manager thread priorities.
• Diagnose complex WLS issues: stuck threads, slow drains, deployment failures, EJB/JPA performance, and JDBC multi-data-source failover.
• Architect Oracle Service Bus (OSB) pipeline patterns: message routing, content-based routing, SLA alerting, and error handling frameworks.
• Troubleshoot OSB proxy service failures, business service timeouts, and WS-Security policy mismatches.
• Design migration paths from Oracle WebLogic/OSB to containerized Java runtimes on OpenShift (Quarkus, Liberty, Helidon).

### OpenShift Platform & Middleware Migration

• Migration Leadership: Lead end-to-end middleware platform migrations to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP 4.x).
• Target-State Design: Design Operator-based middleware management (IBM MQ Operator, DataPower Operator, Event Streams Operator, WebSphere Liberty Operator).
• Resource Strategy: Define namespace strategy, resource quotas, pod disruption budgets, node affinity rules, and storage class selection for stateful middleware.
• GitOps: Establish GitOps-based middleware configuration management using ArgoCD/Tekton pipelines.
• Storage Architecture: Design persistent storage architecture for stateful workloads: OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF), NFS, and block storage for MQ, WAS, and Kafka.
• Networking & Security: Implement OpenShift network policies for middleware service meshes, ingress/egress controls, and TLS termination via Routes/Ingress.
• Modernization: Lead containerization of legacy WAS ND workloads using IBM WebSphere Migration Toolkit and Transformation Advisor.
• Execution Strategy: Define migration waves, cut-over strategies, fallback plans, and parallel-run testing frameworks.
• Observability Stack: Establish the observability stack: OpenShift monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana), log aggregation (EFK/Loki), and distributed tracing (Jaeger/Zipkin).

### Architecture Governance & Advisory

• Subject Matter Expertise: Serve as the core SME for all middleware technology decisions within the managed services engagement.
• Reviews & Planning: Conduct quarterly architecture reviews: capacity planning, technology currency assessments, and EOL/EOS risk reviews.
• Standards & Blueprints: Define middleware standards, design patterns, integration blueprints, and reference architectures for client organizations.
• FinOps: Drive FinOps discipline for middleware workloads on OpenShift: resource right-sizing, license optimization, and cost allocation.
• Business Growth: Participate in pre-sales and solution design activities for new managed services engagements.

## Who You Are

• You are Cloud-Ready: You are deeply familiar with various aspects of cloud technologies and have successfully helped customers adopt public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. You have advised on and architected solutions that involve industry-leading IaaS and PaaS solutions.
• You are a Great Listener: Our goal is to build solutions that last for years and continuously adapt to changing needs of the industry. You are a great listener to your customers, peers, and industry trends, and are highly receptive to what the market needs.
• You are a Collaborator: You enjoy working with multi-cultural teams, both domestic and international, and find ways to get the best out of your people. You also work seamlessly across a variety of roles including core development, design, operations, and support.
• You Believe in Continuous Learning: Things change in our industry continuously, and you love to learn both the underlying technology and the business motivations of our customers, constantly finding new ways to improve our solutions and processes to add value.
• You are Growth-Oriented: You are ready to contribute to rapid growth within a dynamic, agile, small company culture.

Skills: middleware,ibm,architecture,datapower,kafka,design,security,api