Sr Systems Engineer II

Job Summary

Designs, develops, implements, and supports automation capabilities for middleware platforms and services. Works closely with application, infrastructure, security, and operations teams to deliver scalable, secure, reliable, and repeatable solutions using Kubernetes, Ansible, and API Gateway technologies. This role provides senior-level engineering leadership: promotes configuration as code, platform standardization, self-service, and continuous improvement across cloud, container, and traditional middleware environments.

Primary Activities and Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain reusable automation solutions for middleware provisioning, configuration, deployment, patching, upgrades, validation, and operational support.

• Develop Ansible playbooks, roles, inventories, templates, and workflows using Ansible Automation Platform to standardize middleware lifecycle management.

• Deploy, configure, and support middleware workloads on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, including namespaces, deployments, services, routes or ingress, configuration, secrets, storage, and resource policies.

• Develop and maintain Helm charts, Kubernetes manifests, and Argo CD application configurations for repeatable GitOps-based application and middleware deployments.

• Configure and support API and/or AI Gateway capabilities

• Integrate middleware automation with CI/CD and GitOps workflows using source control and delivery platforms such as GitHub, Jenkins, and Argo CD.

• Build configuration-as-code and infrastructure-as-code patterns that are secure, reusable, version controlled, and suitable for deployment across multiple environments.

• Collaborate with application, cloud, network, database, cybersecurity, and production support teams to translate technical requirements into automated solutions.

• Implement automated health checks, post-deployment validation, monitoring, alerting, and remediation for middleware platforms and services.

• Troubleshoot complex deployment, connectivity, certificate, configuration, performance, and integration issues across containerized and traditional middleware environments.

• Create and maintain technical documentation, operational procedures, architecture diagrams, support runbooks, coding standards, and reusable automation patterns.

• Participate in platform reliability, capacity planning, disaster recovery, vulnerability remediation, root cause analysis, and service restoration activities.

• Evaluate emerging platform engineering and automation capabilities and recommend improvements that reduce manual effort, deployment risk, and operational complexity.

• Miscellaneous activities and responsibilities assigned by the manager.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution in Computer Science, Information Systems/Technology, Engineering, or a related field of study.

• 5 or more years of experience in middleware engineering, systems engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure automation, or related technology roles.

• 3 or more years of hands-on experience with Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible automation.

Equivalent Minimum Qualifications

• High School diploma / GED.

• 7 or more years of relevant experience in middleware engineering, systems administration, platform engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure automation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree from an accredited institution in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field of study.

• Experience supporting enterprise middleware platforms in highly available, security-controlled, and production environments.

• Recognized industry certifications including but not limited to:

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

• Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation

• Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator

Knowledge and Skills

• In-depth knowledge of Kubernetes concepts, including pods, deployments, StatefulSets, services, ingress or routes, ConfigMaps, secrets, persistent storage, resource requests and limits, health probes, RBAC, and network policies.

• Strong experience with Red Hat OpenShift or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), including cluster administration, node pools, networking, identity and access, scaling, upgrades, monitoring, and workload deployment practices.

• Strong experience developing automation with Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform, including playbooks, roles, collections, inventories, credentials, templates, and workflows.

• Experience with enterprise API Gateway or API management platforms and related API security and traffic-management policies.

• Knowledge of Argo CD concepts and operations, including applications, projects, synchronization policies, health status, configuration drift detection, RBAC, Helm or Kustomize integration, and multi-cluster GitOps delivery.

• Knowledge of REST APIs, JSON, YAML, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, certificates, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, mTLS, and service-to-service integrations.

• Experience with Git-based development practices, pull requests, branching strategies, CI/CD pipelines, testing, and release automation.

• Experience with Terraform, including reusable modules, variables, providers, state management, plan and apply workflows, and infrastructure provisioning through CI/CD pipelines.

• Knowledge of Linux administration, networking, DNS, load balancing technologies such as Citrix NetScaler, firewalls, proxies, observability, and secure credential management.

• Ability to diagnose complex issues using platform logs, application logs, Kubernetes events, API Gateway traces, network tests, and monitoring data.

• Ability to communicate fluently orally and in writing and present technical information to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Ability to work independently, collaborate across teams, prioritize competing work, and rapidly apply new technical information.

Good to Have Skills

• Hands-on experience with traditional middleware platforms such as IBM WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Liberty, Red Hat JBoss EAP, Apache Tomcat, IBM HTTP Server, or Apache HTTP Server.

• Experience with messaging and integration platforms such as IBM MQ, IBM App Connect Enterprise, Apache Kafka, ActiveMQ.

• Experience with API Gateway products such as Axway API Gateway, Kong, Azure API Management, or similar technologies.

• Knowledge of service mesh technologies such as Istio or OpenShift Service Mesh.

• Experience with Terraform and public cloud platforms, particularly Microsoft Azure.

• Experience with monitoring and logging tools such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana or the Elastic Stack.

• Experience automating certificate renewal, middleware patching, security hardening, compliance evidence collection, and disaster recovery validation.

• Experience provisioning and operating AKS and supporting Azure resources with Terraform, including reusable modules, remote state, environment-specific configurations, policy controls, and automated validation.

• Experience implementing GitOps delivery with Argo CD for Helm charts and Kubernetes manifests, including automated synchronization, promotion across environments, rollback, drift remediation, and access controls.

Leadership

Demonstrates leadership by producing results, creating change, and inspiring excellence. Promotes automation-first engineering, operational ownership, knowledge sharing, disciplined problem solving, and collaboration across technology teams.