Overview
East West Bank is seeking a hands-on Senior Middleware Engineer with deep IBM MQ expertise and working knowledge of Apache Kafka, webhooks, and event management platforms. The initial focus is to design, install, configure, document, standardize, stabilize, and support IBM MQ for the Wire Payment Bridge (WPB) initiative. As the middleware service matures, the role will expand to engineering and operational support for additional event-driven and integration products, including Kafka-based streaming, webhook delivery, and event cataloging, governance, and management platforms.
The engineer will collaborate with payment application developers, integration and infrastructure teams, Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, QA, Wire Operations, and external platform partners. This is an engineering delivery role, not solely a queue-administration or project-coordination position. The objective is to close a critical IBM MQ skill gap while establishing reusable middleware patterns, operational controls, platform standards, and knowledge transfer for the Bank.
Responsibilities
IBM MQ Engineering, Installation, and Integration Design
- Design, install, upgrade, patch, configure, and troubleshoot IBM MQ queue managers and supporting components across development, test, disaster recovery, and production environments.
- Configure and support local, remote, alias, model, transmission, dead-letter, and backout queues; sender, receiver, server-connection, and cluster channels; listeners; client connectivity; and distributed messaging.
- Define dependable asynchronous messaging patterns, including request/reply, correlation identifiers, acknowledgments, persistence, message ordering, delivery guarantees, expiry, and transactional commit/rollback behavior.
- Implement and support application connectivity using IBM MQ client APIs, MQI, JMS, Java, .NET, and approved integration frameworks; partner with engineering teams on interface contracts, payload handling, and error behavior.
- Evaluate MQ topology, configuration, capacity, client connection methods, dependencies, error flows, and technical debt; recommend pragmatic, supportable improvements.
- Automate repeatable installation, configuration, validation, and deployment activities using MQSC, scripting, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and enterprise change controls.
- Establish and maintain IBM MQ engineering standards, configuration baselines, naming conventions, build procedures, security patterns, support documentation, and lifecycle roadmaps.
Kafka and Event Streaming Engineering
- Engineer and support Kafka clusters and managed Kafka services, including brokers, topics, partitions, replication, producers, consumers, consumer groups, retention, compaction, and secure connectivity.
- Partner with application teams to design event streams, partitioning keys, ordering boundaries, delivery semantics, retry and dead-letter patterns, idempotent processing, and replay procedures.
- Implement and govern schemas using Avro, JSON Schema, or Protobuf and schema-registry practices; enforce compatibility standards and controlled event-contract evolution.
- Monitor and tune throughput, latency, consumer lag, partition distribution, replication health, storage utilization, and capacity; define actionable service-level indicators and alerts.
- Apply authentication, authorization, TLS, certificate, service-account, access-control, quota, and data-protection requirements to Kafka producers, consumers, topics, and administrative functions.
- Support Kafka Connect, connectors, stream-processing integrations, and platform upgrades where adopted; validate resilience, failover, backup, restoration, and disaster-recovery procedures.
Webhook and Event-Driven Integration
- Define and support secure webhook standards covering endpoint registration, HTTPS/TLS, authentication, request signing, secret rotation, payload validation, timeouts, retries, exponential backoff, rate limits, and delivery status tracking.
- Engineer reliable webhook delivery using unique event identifiers, idempotency controls, duplicate detection, dead-letter handling, replay, retention, and consumer acknowledgement where applicable.
- Create reusable webhook interface templates and documentation, including event definitions, payload examples, versioning rules, ownership, error codes, support expectations, and deprecation procedures.
- Work with API management, network, security, and application teams to control ingress and egress, protect sensitive data, validate external destinations, and prevent unauthorized event delivery.
- Implement observability for delivery success rate, response codes, latency, retries, failed endpoints, backlog, and replay activity; support incident response and root-cause analysis.
Wire Payment Bridge and Transaction Integrity
- Provide IBM MQ design and implementation expertise for WPB interfaces and related payment orchestration services, including the Unified Wire API and downstream payment, screening, and core-processing integrations, consistent with approved solution architecture.
- Partner with application teams to define message and event schemas, validation, field mapping, routing, correlation, and end-to-end payment status and error propagation.
- Design recovery approaches for delayed, rejected, duplicated, out-of-order, and undeliverable messages or events; support safe retries, backout handling, replay, reprocessing, and reconciliation without duplicate payment execution.
- Ensure message-flow and event-flow designs respect payment cutoffs, authorization and sanctions-screening gates, settlement dependencies, audit trails, and exception-management procedures.
- Support integration and end-to-end testing of wire initiation, processing, acknowledgement, exception handling, outage recovery, and reconciliation scenarios.
Reliability, Security, and Operational Readiness
- Engineer and validate availability, clustering, failover, restart, recovery, and disaster-recovery behavior for middleware components supporting critical payment and enterprise integrations.
- Implement monitoring for queue depth, message age, channel and queue-manager health, broker and partition health, consumer lag, throughput, latency, delivery failures, dead-letter activity, certificate expiration, and platform capacity.
- Apply approved security controls, including TLS and certificate management, IBM MQ CHLAUTH/CONNAUTH, object-level authorization, Kafka ACLs, secure service identities, least privilege, encryption, secrets management, and protected handling of payment data.
- Analyze platform logs, return/reason codes, traces, network dependencies, infrastructure telemetry, and application behavior to diagnose performance or processing failures.
- Produce and exercise runbooks for restart, failover, dead-letter processing, controlled replay, webhook recovery, incident escalation, release validation, certificate rotation, and support handoff.
Delivery, Testing, and Production Support
- Contribute hands-on engineering deliverables throughout the SDLC, including design, build, configuration and code review, testing, deployment, cutover, and post-implementation stabilization.
- Collaborate with QA and operations teams to define failure-mode tests, negative cases, performance and load tests, recoverability exercises, replay tests, and production acceptance criteria.
- Support incident and problem management, root-cause analysis, defect remediation, and Level 3 escalation for middleware-related production issues.
- Maintain middleware product inventories, versions, dependencies, support status, vulnerabilities, certificates, and lifecycle plans.
- Participate in planned implementation windows and critical-incident support outside standard business hours as reasonably required and agreed.
Collaboration and Knowledge Transfer
- Partner with Application Development, API and Integration Engineering, Cloud and Network, Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, DBA, QA, IT Operations, and payment platform vendors to resolve technical dependencies.
- Document solution decisions, middleware standards, environment configurations, operational ownership, support procedures, interface contracts, and known failure modes in accessible engineering documentation.
- Coach internal team members, conduct structured handoffs, and reduce long-term single-person dependency for IBM MQ and other middleware platform expertise.
Qualifications
- Approximately 7+ years of middleware or integration engineering experience, including 5+ years of substantial hands-on IBM MQ implementation and production support experience.
- Demonstrated experience installing, configuring, upgrading, and troubleshooting queue managers, channels, listeners, queues, clustering, MQSC/runmqsc, client connections, dead-letter and backout handling, and distributed messaging.
- Experience integrating IBM MQ with enterprise applications using JMS, MQI, or supported client libraries, with practical exposure to Java, .NET, scripting, or comparable technologies.
- Working experience with Apache Kafka or a compatible enterprise distribution, including topics, partitions, replication, producers, consumers, consumer groups, retention, schema management, security, monitoring, and operational support.
- Understanding of webhook design and operations, including HTTPS, authentication or signing, retries, backoff, idempotency, rate limiting, observability, and failure recovery.
- Familiarity with event-driven architecture, event catalogs or management platforms, AsyncAPI, schema governance, and controlled sharing of event streams.
- Strong understanding of asynchronous processing, transaction boundaries, persistence, duplicate handling, ordering, idempotency, recovery, replay, and data reconciliation.
- Hands-on knowledge of middleware authentication and authorization, TLS and certificates, least-privilege access, secrets management, and secure service-to-service communications.
- Ability to diagnose complex production issues across application, middleware, operating system, network, database, and downstream-system boundaries using logs, metrics, traces, and platform diagnostic data.
- Experience with controlled releases, production monitoring, high availability and disaster recovery, incident management, and disciplined documentation in a regulated or highly available environment.
- Strong analytical, collaboration, and written and verbal communication skills; ability to work directly with engineers, architects, support teams, and business operations.
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical engineering experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in banking, commercial payments, treasury technology, wire processing, or another high-value and high-integrity transaction environment.
- Familiarity with Fedwire, SWIFT, ISO 20022, payment screening, exception processing, and wire-payment lifecycle controls.
- Experience with IBM MQ clustering, multi-instance queue managers, RDQM, MQ Appliance, or other supported HA/DR topologies and performance tuning on Linux, Windows, AIX, or z/OS.
- Experience with Confluent Platform or Confluent Cloud, IBM Event Streams, Red Hat AMQ Streams, Azure Event Hubs for Kafka, or similar Kafka-compatible platforms.
- Experience with IBM Event Endpoint Management, IBM Event Automation, Confluent Stream Governance, or another event cataloging, gateway, and governance platform.
- Experience with API management and integration platforms such as MuleSoft, IBM API Connect, or Azure API Management, particularly for webhook security and lifecycle management.
- Familiarity with CI/CD, Ansible or Terraform, infrastructure-as-code, Git, Splunk or comparable observability platforms, Jira, Confluence, ITIL practices, and enterprise change management.
- Relevant certifications in IBM MQ, Apache Kafka or Confluent, cloud platforms, or integration architecture are beneficial.
Applicants must have legal authorization to work in the United States. We do not offer visa sponsorship at this time.
CompensationThe base pay range for this position is USD $145,000.00/Yr. - USD $165,000.00/Yr. Exact offers will be determined based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location.
