Application Support & Maintenance Engineer (L2/L3) - ESB, OpenShift & API Integration

Role: Application Support & Maintenance Engineer (L2/L3) ESB, OpenShift & API Integration

Location: Frisco, TX (Remote)

Type: Contract

Position Summary:

• We are seeking an experienced Application Support & Maintenance Engineer (L2/L3) with strong expertise in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), OpenShift Container Platform, API Management, and Integration Services. The candidate will be responsible for providing production support, maintenance, monitoring, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement of integration platforms, APIs, middleware services, and containerized applications.
• This role requires hands-on experience supporting enterprise integration ecosystems, ensuring high availability, performance, security, and reliability of business-critical interfaces and services. The candidate will work closely with application, infrastructure, cloud, database, security, and business teams to support a 24x7 production environment.

Day to Day job Duties:

Application Support & Incident Management:

• Provide L2/L3 production support for ESB, API integration, and OpenShift-hosted applications.
• Monitor integration services, APIs, message queues, and middleware components.
• Analyze and resolve incidents, service requests, and production issues within SLA commitments.
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and implement preventive measures for recurring issues.
• Coordinate with development, infrastructure, cloud, database, and business teams during major incidents.
• Support critical business interfaces and ensure uninterrupted application availability.

ESB & Integration Support:

• Support enterprise integration platforms and middleware services.
• Monitor and troubleshoot message flows, service orchestration, routing, transformations, and connectivity issues.
• Diagnose integration failures across applications, databases, third-party systems, SaaS platforms, and APIs.
• Support interface reprocessing, message retries, and failure recovery procedures.
• Ensure successful execution of scheduled integration workflows and batch processes.
• Work with vendors and application teams to resolve integration-related issues.

API Support & Management:

• Monitor API performance, availability, response times, and error rates.
• Troubleshoot REST and SOAP API integrations.
• Support API Gateway configurations, security policies, throttling, and access controls.
• Analyze API logs and transaction traces for issue diagnosis.
• Manage API lifecycle activities including deployments, versioning, and decommissioning.
• Support API authentication mechanisms including OAuth, JWT, SAML, and API Keys.

OpenShift Platform Support:

• Support containerized applications deployed on Red Hat OpenShift.
• Monitor OpenShift clusters, pods, namespaces, routes, and application health.
• Troubleshoot container failures, deployment issues, and platform-related incidents.
• Support application deployments, rollbacks, scaling activities, and platform upgrades.
• Collaborate with platform engineering teams for capacity planning and performance optimization.
• Ensure compliance with security and operational standards.
• Change & Release Management
• Participate in release planning, deployment validation, and production readiness reviews.
• Support CI/CD deployment activities in production and non-production environments.
• Implement approved changes following organizational change management processes.
• Conduct post-deployment validation and rollback support when required.

Monitoring & Operations:

• Proactively monitor applications, middleware services, APIs, and platform health.
• Configure alerts, dashboards, and operational monitoring tools.
• Ensure integration SLAs and business availability requirements are consistently met.
• Support performance tuning and capacity planning activities.

Documentation & Compliance:

• Maintain runbooks, operational procedures, and knowledge articles.
• Document integration architectures, interface dependencies, and troubleshooting procedures.
• Ensure adherence to ITIL Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management processes.
• Support audit, security, and compliance requirements.

Required Technical Skills:

Middleware & ESB Platforms:

• IBM Integration Bus (IIB)

• Rhapsody

API Management Platforms (Experience with):

• Apigee
• Azure API Management
• API Gateway Solutions

OpenShift & Container Technologies:

• Red Hat OpenShift
• Kubernetes
• Docker Containers
• Container Networking
• Helm Charts
• Container Security
• Deployment Management

Cloud Platforms (Exposure to one or more):

• Microsoft Azure
• AWS
• Google Cloud Platform

Monitoring & Logging:

• Splunk
• Dynatrace
• Grafana
• OpenShift Monitoring Stack

Scripting & Automation:

• Shell Scripting
• PowerShell
• Python
• Java

Database Knowledge:

• SQL Server
• PostgreSQL

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of Application Support and Maintenance experience.

• 3+ years supporting ESB, Middleware, or Integration Platforms.
• 5+Years of Hands-on experience supporting OpenShift or Kubernetes environments.
• 5+Years of Experience managing enterprise API ecosystems.
• 5+Years of experience in Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills.
• 5+Years of experience in production operations and 24x7 support environments.
• Understanding of ITIL Service Management practices.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience supporting microservices-based architectures.
• Exposure to DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or OpenShift Pipelines.
• Knowledge of service mesh technologies such as Istio.
• Experience with healthcare, retail, financial services, or manufacturing integrations.
• OpenShift, Rhapsody, Kubernetes, Apigee, or IBM Integration certifications.

Soft Skills:

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to work effectively in global teams.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical mindset.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent documentation and knowledge-sharing capabilities.
• Customer-focused approach with strong ownership and accountability.