Description
What's it all about?
Reporting directly to the Middleware & Database Senior Manager within the company's Operations & Infrastructure Technology team, the Middleware Consultant will be responsible for the various aspects of supporting our business critical applications from a Middleware perspective.
The successful candidate will join others within the O&I Product team, specifically other Middleware Consultants to support the technology needs of the business, including designing, developing and supporting our applications. Collectively the team ensures company systems maintain agreed availability, performance, maintainability and security standards. Working alongside others both within O&I teams and wider, this role requires delivery of technical solutions that align with the infrastructure strategy, identifying areas for automation and simplification.
Knowledge and understanding of IT infrastructure components (Servers, network, storage, application software and data centre facilities) and ITSM related processes are critical to this role.
About the Team
The main function of the team is to provide support to the end users, maintain and support our infrastructure including the cloud-based environments and services. The wider team is made up of various SMEs supporting all aspects of Operations and Infrastructure. Whilst there are dedicated SMEs in many streams, this role works closely across all IT teams to design, maintain and deliver projects and improvements to the different areas and technologies.
What we expect of you, day to day.
- Support the technology needs of the business (design, development and support of technology infrastructure).
- Ensure that systems meet stated objectives relating to availability, performance, maintainability and security.
- L3 Technical point of contact for our Business Critical services and other on prem or 3rd party applications.
- Lead and participate in project activities.
- Drive and help deliver the migration of our existing applications into Data Centres from a Middleware and application perspective.
- Develop and deliver effective technical solutions, aligned with the infrastructure strategy.
- Align with the company's Change, Incident and problem management processes.
- Remediate security findings and other vulnerabilities within resolution dates.
- Build and manage relationships with other teams and divisions both locally and as a wider organisation.
- Work with the requirements, documentation, and training teams so process improvements are implemented, documented, and users are trained in their use.
- Evangelises the virtues of IT process management, creating a collaborative environment.
- Liaise in written and verbal forms with peers and other areas of the business, presenting to Senior Management where required to gain support.
What we're after
- At least 10+ years extensive experience in Middleware technologies
- Practical experience with;
- Java application platform and Application Server technologies specifically JBoss Fuse and EAP
- best practices for RedHat Fuse Integration
- Installation of Apache Karaf.
- Fabric 8 deployment model.
- Pub-sub model integrations using RedHat Fuse - (especially ActivMQ).
- Setting-up/verifying the UNIX/Linux application environment.
- Nginx and Apache Web Server Administration.
- Basic knowledge at least of Cxf and OSGI.
- Implementation of web applications using J2EE technologies such as REST and SOAP Web Services and EJB, Batch processes, Pub-sub model integrations using RedHat Fuse and (messaging server)
- Implement security and data protection for integrations as applicable.
- Automate the administration of the application start up scripts and run-time environment tasks where possible.
- IBM WebSphere Application Server Administration (Version 8.5.5 onwards) Administration (Installation, Configuration, Patching, Migrations, performance monitoring & tuning, security hardening, and application deployments of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment and BASE versions)
- IBM HTTP Server, Nginx and Apache Web Server Administration.
- Experience administering Springboot Servers.
- Good exposure to mark-up languages like HTML and XML.
- Experience with developing Ansible roles to automate application installation and configuration management.
- Experience in Performance Tuning of Web applications.
- Good understanding of High availability, clustering concepts and architectures.
- Experience using version controlling tools such as Git on private repositories for the organization in GitHub/BitBucket
- Knowledge of basic network and security fundamentals including transport layer protocols (TCP/IP) as well as common application layer protocols (eg DNS, FTP, SMTP, etc.) and Firewalls.
- Deep understanding of DevOps benefits and concepts.
- Experience Leading and working with offshore teams.
- Proven practical problem solving and analysis experience.
- Good presentation and communications skills across multiple levels of the organisation, including senior management.
- Ability, desire and motivation to learn quickly and pick up new processes with an eye for detail and improvements.
- Organised and be able to prioritise workload to meet deadlines.
- Demonstrable teamworking attitude, ready to initiate collaboration and resolve conflicts.
- Strong interpersonal, facilitation, and leadership skills along with effective communication (both written and verbal).
Think you have what it takes?
If you are interested in a career that will challenge and inspire you - we'd love to hear from you!