IBM Middleware Engineer (ACE / Kafka / MQ) – 24/7 Operations

Joining the IBM Technology Expert Labs teams means you’ll have a career delivering world-class services for our clients. As the ultimate expert in IBM products you’ll bring together all the necessary technology and services to help customers solve their most challenging problems. Working in IBM Technology Expert Labs means accelerating the time to value confidently and ensuring speed and insight while our clients focus on what they do best—running and growing their business.

Excellent onboarding and industry-leading learning culture will set you up for a positive impact while advancing your career. Our culture is collaborative and experiential. As part of a team you will be surrounded by bright minds and keen co-creators—always willing to help and be helped—as you apply passion to work that will positively impact the world around us.

We are looking for an experienced IBM Middleware Engineer with strong hands-on expertise in IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) IBM MQ and Apache Kafka to join our 24/7 operations team .
The role involves monitoring incident resolution troubleshooting performance tuning and ensuring high availability of middleware and integration platforms in mission-critical production environments.

• Provide L2/L3 support for IBM ACE IBM MQ and Kafka platforms in a rotational 24/7 support model .

• Monitor system health queues message flows Kafka brokers topics and connectors.

• Perform initial triage root-cause analysis and coordinate issue resolution.

• Handle production incidents outages and performance degradations with strict SLAs.

• Participate in on-call rotation and ensure timely response to alerts.

• Monitor and support ACE message flows integration servers bar deployments and node runtime.

• Troubleshoot flow failures mapping errors ESQL issues and performance bottlenecks.

• Work with developers for fix coordination and deployment activities.

• Monitor and support queue managers queues channels listeners and cluster components.

• Handle dead-letter queues (DLQ) message failures channel resets and TLS certificate issues.

• Perform MQ object administration during maintenance windows.

• Monitor and support Kafka clusters brokers topics partitions and consumer groups.

• Handle connectivity issues lag monitoring offset resets schema registry usage and connector failures.

• Perform health checks and assist in scaling tuning and troubleshooting.

• Execute scheduled maintenance patching certificate renewals and system upgrades.

• Maintain runbooks SOPs and production documentation.

• Provide inputs for stability improvements and automation opportunities.

• Work with cross-functional teams for major incident handling and post-incident reviews.

• Strong hands-on knowledge of:

  • IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE V11/V12)

  • IBM MQ (9.x or above)

  • Apache Kafka (Confluent/Open-source)

• Good understanding of:

  • Message flows ESQL mapping nodes

  • MQSC commands MQ clusters MQ security

  • Kafka Connect Schema Registry consumer lag message retention

  • Integration patterns: pub/sub request-reply async messaging

• Familiarity with:

  • Linux/Unix environment

  • Shell scripting (bash/ksh)

  • Monitoring tools (Instana Grafana Splunk ELK or similar)

  • SSL/TLS certificates and security configurations

  • CI/CD tools (Jenkins Git Tekton) – preferred

• Strong analytical and troubleshooting abilities.

• Ability to handle pressure during critical incidents.

• Clear communication and documentation discipline.

• Strong ownership accountability and teamwork.

• Experience with Kubernetes/OpenShift middleware deployments.

• Knowledge of IBM ACE development (ESQL/JavaCompute).

• Experience with event-driven architecture.

• Exposure to cloud (AWS Azure GCP).