Job Description

About the Role

We are establishing a new internal capability to own, engineer, and modernise the firm’s global IBMMQ estate. The IBMMQ Platform Engineer will be a key technical contributor responsible for the design, build, automation, and operational excellence of the IBMMQ platform as we transition away from outsourced management and toward a modern, self‑service, cloud‑ready IBMMQ messaging backbone.

You will work directly with architects, application teams, infrastructure, and global engineering functions to uplift the current IBMMQ estate, reduce operational burden, introduce best‑practice automation, and drive the roadmap for next‑generation messaging capabilities.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

Platform Engineering & Modernisation

• Re-design, implement, and support a completely a modern IBMMQ backbone, running on Kubernetes, utlising NativeHA and the latest CRR features for resilience

• Lead the migration from legacy configurations to Git‑based declarative queue/ channel/ topic configuration pipelines.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure‑as‑Code patterns for MQ deployments (Ansible/Terraform/Kubernetes Operators depending on architecture direction).
• Implement robust observability, including metrics, logs, dashboards, and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, etc.).
• Partner with the architecture function on broader messaging strategy alignment, looking at features like Streaming Queues to enable bridging flow to Kafka/Redpanda

Operational Ownership

• Manage the lifecycle of global queue managers — installation, patching, upgrades, configuration, security hardening.
• Handle incident diagnosis and resolution, including hung queue managers, performance degradation, and integration issues
• Maintain consistent operational standards across all environments (Dev/Pre‑Prod/DR/Prod).

Automation & DevOps

• Build pipelines for automated provisioning, validation, and deployment of MQ resources.
• Create self‑service workflows allowing application teams to safely request/configure queues without manual intervention.
• Contribute to platform SRE maturity through error‑budgeting, reliability scorecards, and toil‑reduction initiatives.

Security & Integration

• Implement and maintain LDAP / AD integration, RBAC, TLS, mTLS, and certificate automation.
• Ensure audit, compliance, and security standards are met across all MQ assets.
• Work with network engineering on secure, low‑latency connectivity and cross‑region routing.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Partner with globally distributed teams (including AES, Data Engineering, Networks, and Architecture).
• Contribute to technical designs, standards, and best‑practice playbooks.
• Mentor junior engineers and help shape the future internal MQ engineering capability.
• Participate in strategic IBMMQ discussions and roadmap initiatives.

Qualifications

Required Skills & Experience

Technical Expertise

• 4–10+ years working with IBM MQ in engineering, DevOps, SRE, or platform‑support roles.
• Strong understanding of MQ queue managers, channels, listeners, clustering, security exits, and message flows.
• Hands‑on experience with MQ NativeHA, HA clusters, DR patterns, replication and failover.
• Experience integrating MQ with Prometheus, Datadog, or equivalent monitoring stacks.
• Proficiency with Linux administration, scripting (Python, Shell), and system performance tuning.
• Demonstrated experience in automation, CI/CD, and Infrastructure‑as‑Code

Desirable Skills

• Background with containerised MQ (MQ Operator, Kubernetes/OpenShift).
• Experience designing self‑service platforms or internal developer portals.
• Exposure to other messaging technologies (Kafka/Redpanda, Redhat AMQ7) to support future messaging strategy alignment.
• Familiarity with enterprise security controls, LDAP/SSO integration, certificates, and encryption.
• Experience in financial services or other highly regulated sectors.

Personal Attributes

• Strong problem‑solving mindset with a drive to modernise legacy systems.
• Comfortable owning a critical platform end‑to‑end.
• Excellent communication skills; able to influence and collaborate across engineering, operations, and architecture groups.
• Self‑starter with the ability to work independently and proactively.
• Passion for automation, reliability engineering, and designing for scale.

What Success Looks Like

• A stable, fully automated MQ estate with reduced operational burdens.
• Successful rollout of NativeHA and cross‑region architectures.
• Realisation of self‑service configuration flows for application teams.
• Clear observability, security, and governance maturity across the platform.