Senior Middleware Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Middleware Engineer with deep expertise in enterprise messaging, event-driven architecture, and distributed systems integration. In this senior-level role you will be the technical authority for all middleware platforms across the organisation, owning the design, deployment, performance, and reliability of messaging infrastructure that underpins our mission-critical applications.

You will lead integration strategy across RabbitMQ, Redis, and Azure Service Bus, working alongside development, DevOps, and cloud architecture teams to deliver scalable, resilient, and observable messaging solutions. You will also serve as the primary escalation point for integration incidents and provide technical leadership and mentoring to the wider engineering team.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Architect, deploy, and operate enterprise messaging and middleware platforms including RabbitMQ, Redis, and Azure Service Bus across development, staging, and production environments.

Design and govern event-driven and message-driven integration patterns: pub/sub, competing consumers, dead-letter handling, saga/choreography, and request-reply.

Lead performance engineering for middleware: tune RabbitMQ broker configuration, channel and prefetch settings, Redis eviction policies, cluster topology, and Azure Service Bus namespace tiers and partitioning.

Define and enforce standards for message schema design, versioning, serialisation (JSON, Avro, Protobuf), and backward/forward compatibility.

Implement and maintain High Availability and Disaster Recovery for middleware: RabbitMQ mirrored/quorum queues, Redis Cluster and Sentinel, Azure Service Bus geo-redundancy and paired namespaces.

Establish end-to-end observability: distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), metrics (Prometheus/Grafana), and alerting for queue depth, consumer lag, connection pool saturation, and error rates.

Collaborate with application development teams to review integration designs, message flow architectures, and service mesh configurations before production release.

Own middleware security posture: TLS configuration, certificate management, RBAC/ACL policies on brokers, Managed Identity authentication for Azure Service Bus, and secrets management.

Drive Infrastructure-as-Code adoption for middleware provisioning using Terraform, Bicep, or Ansible.

Support CI/CD pipeline integration for automated deployment, configuration, and smoke-testing of middleware components.

Lead incident response and post-incident reviews for Severity 1 middleware outages; produce actionable remediation plans.

Mentor mid-level and junior engineers; produce architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and operational documentation.