Senior Infrastructure Specialist

Join Lloyds Banking Group as a Senior Infrastructure Specialist, where you will lead the design and evolution of our enterprise messaging and middleware services. You will be part of the Middleware Engineering team, responsible for critical middleware services across our Private Cloud estate. Your role will involve hands-on engineering, operational responsibility, and driving modernization through automation and containerization. You will also act as a middleware technical authority, mentor colleagues, and champion automation, resilience, observability, and security-by-design across middleware services.

• Lead the design and evolution of IBM MQ and wider middleware services across VMware and Red Hat OpenShift platforms, driving the appropriate adoption of containerisation and Operator-based deployment.
• Act as a middleware technical authority, leading technical conversations with stakeholders, partners, vendors and senior leaders, and champion automation, resilience, observability and security-by-design across middleware services.
• Mentor colleagues, share specialist knowledge and help raise engineering standards and capability across the wider Private Cloud platform.

• We’re looking for someone with significant hands-on experience engineering and supporting IBM MQ in large-scale enterprise environments
• Deep technical knowledge of IBM MQ architecture and distributed messaging, including queue managers, channels and clustering
• Experience across the full MQ lifecycle, from design and installation through configuration, patching, upgrades and ongoing platform management
• Understanding of enterprise security, risk, change and operational controls, with effective communication across infrastructure, application and platform teams
• Strong experience securing MQ through TLS, certificates, authentication, authorisation and secure configuration
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex infrastructure, performance and application-connectivity issues
• Containers and enterprise platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift or Kubernetes, including Operators, containerised IBM MQ and relevant certification
• Experience with other enterprise middleware, particularly IBM WebSphere Application Server or IBM DataPower
• Automation, CI/CD, source control and GitOps using tools such as Git, GitHub, Jenkins, Harness, Ansible, Python or Bash
• Monitoring and observability with tools such as Dynatrace, Prometheus or Grafana
• Agile, cross-disciplinary engineering experience, including mentoring colleagues, improving standards and modernising traditional middleware
• Operating critical middleware across VMware, private or hybrid cloud environments, including incident management, resilience, backup and disaster recovery