Senior Middleware Engineer

Role Overview

• Architect, deploy, and operate enterprise messaging and middleware platforms including RabbitMQ, Redis, and Azure Service Bus across development, staging, and production environments.
• Design and govern event-driven and message-driven integration patterns: pub/sub, competing consumers, dead-letter handling, saga/choreography, and request-reply.
• Lead performance engineering for middleware: tune RabbitMQ broker configuration, channel and prefetch settings, Redis eviction policies, cluster topology, and Azure Service Bus namespace tiers and partitioning.
• Define and enforce standards for message schema design, versioning, serialisation (JSON, Avro, Protobuf), and backward/forward compatibility.
• Implement and maintain High Availability and Disaster Recovery for middleware: RabbitMQ mirrored/quorum queues, Redis Cluster and Sentinel, Azure Service Bus geo-redundancy and paired namespaces.
• Establish end-to-end observability: distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics (Prometheus/Grafana), and alerting for queue depth, consumer lag, connection pool saturation, and error rates.
• Collaborate with application development teams to review integration designs, message flow architectures, and service mesh configurations before production release.
• Own middleware security posture: TLS configuration, certificate management, RBAC/ACL policies on brokers, Managed Identity authentication for Azure Service Bus, and secrets management.
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code adoption for middleware provisioning using Terraform, Bicep, or Ansible.
• Support CI/CD pipeline integration for automated deployment, configuration, and smoke-testing of middleware components.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews for Severity 1 middleware outages; produce actionable remediation plans.
• Mentor mid-level and junior engineers; produce architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and operational documentation.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering or platform engineering experience, with 4+ years focused on middleware and integration platforms.
• Demonstrable senior-level expertise across RabbitMQ, Redis, and Azure Service Bus in production enterprise environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: eventual consistency, idempotency, at-least-once vs exactly-once delivery, and the two-generals problem.
• Experience designing and implementing event-driven microservices architectures and service integration patterns (EIP).
• Proficiency in at least one primary programming language commonly used for integration workloads: C# (.NET), Java/Kotlin, Python, or Go.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes or container orchestration for middleware workloads (Helm charts, operators).
• Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform, Bicep, or Ansible for middleware provisioning.
• Strong observability skills: distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, metrics with Prometheus/Grafana, and structured logging.
• Experience with secure middleware configuration: TLS/mTLS, certificate rotation, secrets management (Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault).
• Proven ability to lead technical initiatives, produce architectural documentation, and mentor engineers.

Tech Stack

• Ansible
• Azure
• Distributed Systems
• Grafana
• Java
• Kotlin
• Kubernetes
• Microservices
• Prometheus
• Python
• RabbitMQ
• Redis
• Terraform
• Vault
• Go
• .NET