MQ Automation Engineer (Chef Cookbook Development)

MQ Automation Engineer (Chef Cookbook Development)


6-12 months - Pure contract


Dallas, TX


Hybrid - 3 Days onsite


$50.00/hr c2c

is a financial services company that provides clearing, settlement, custody, and risk management services for securities transactions. It acts as a central clearinghouse, manages assets, reduces counterparty risk, facilitates trade reporting, and operates technology platforms for efficient processing. Its role is to ensure the smooth functioning of securities markets and enhance transparency in the financial system

Role Overview


We are seeking a hands-on Automation Engineer with strong Chef expertise to design, develop, and maintain Chef cookbooks for IBM MQ build and configuration management. This role is critical in driving Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) adoption, standardizing MQ deployments, and enabling automated, repeatable, and compliant messaging platform provisioning across hybrid and cloud environments.


The ideal candidate combines strong MQ platform knowledge with Chef-based automation and has experience delivering end-to-end lifecycle automation for queue managers, infrastructure configuration, and operational tooling.

Key Responsibilities
• Design, develop, and maintain Chef cookbooks to automate:


o IBM MQ installation, upgrade and patching


o Queue manager creation and configuration


o MQ object deployment (queues, channels, listeners)
• Build idempotent Chef roles and recipes ensuring consistent and repeatable deployments across environments
• Ensure configuration parity across Dev, QA, and Prod environments through Chef deployments
• Integrate Chef cookbooks into CI/CD pipelines for automated MQ provisioning and updates
• Version, test, and promote cookbooks through controlled environments
• Develop and execute unit, integration, and kitchen/inspec tests for cookbooks
• Validate automation against performance, resiliency, and compliance requirements
• Ensure deployments are repeatable and eliminate manual configuration drift
• Provide L3 support for automation-related issues in MQ environments
• Contribute to standards, best practices, and automation frameworks

Required Qualifications
• Strong hands-on experience with Chef (cookbooks, recipes, roles, environments)
• 5+ years of experience in configuration management / IaC automation
• Working knowledge of IBM MQ administration:


o Queue managers, channels, clustering


o MQ configuration (QM.INI, logging, security)
• Experience with Linux/Unix environments
• Familiarity with:


o CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, Git-based workflows)


o Version control systems (Bitbucket/Git)