Senior Middleware Engineer

RESPONSIBILITIES:
A client with Kforce is seeking a Senior Middleware Engineer to join their team in El Monte, CA.

Summary:
We are 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, this 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 Senior Middleware 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.

Key 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

REQUIREMENTS:
* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical engineering experience
* 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 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
* 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

The pay range is the lowest to highest compensation we reasonably in good faith believe we would pay at posting for this role. We may ultimately pay more or less than this range. Employee pay is based on factors like relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, seniority, location, performance, union contract and business needs. This range may be modified in the future.

We offer comprehensive benefits including medical/dental/vision insurance, HSA, FSA, 401(k), and life, disability & ADD insurance to eligible employees. Salaried personnel receive paid time off. Hourly employees are not eligible for paid time off unless required by law. Hourly employees on a Service Contract Act project are eligible for paid sick leave.

Note: Pay is not considered compensation until it is earned, vested and determinable. The amount and availability of any compensation remains in Kforce's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified in its discretion consistent with the law.

This job is not eligible for bonuses, incentives or commissions.

Kforce is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, or disability status.

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