L2 Application Support Engineer (Integration & Middleware)

Role Objective

Strategic Technical Leadership

• Trace transaction flows from API Connect through ACE to backend Spring Boot microservices.
• Lead root-cause investigations into MQ message losses, ACE synchronization errors, and Spring Boot JVM crashes.
• Oversee OpenShift integration component stability, CPU and memory allocation, and pod scaling.
• Manage and troubleshoot mTLS, OAuth2, JWE, and JWS security protocols.

IBM CP4I Responsibilities

• Troubleshoot ACE message flows, ESQL logic errors, and SAP, database, and file adapter connectivity.
• Manage IBM MQ queue managers and resolve channel retries, dead-letter queues, and message persistence issues.
• Resolve API Connect API definition, security policy, and DataPower gateway latency issues.

Backend and Monitoring

• Analyze JVM thread dumps and heap dumps to resolve microservice memory leaks and high CPU utilization.
• Troubleshoot Spring Boot integrations with databases and external messaging systems.
• Use ELK or Splunk to correlate logs across multiple microservices and identify failure points.

Technical Skill Set

• Mastery of IBM CP4I, specifically ACE, MQ, and API Connect, is required.
• Advanced knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, including Spring Integration and Spring Cloud, is required.
• Expert-level proficiency in Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes is required.
• Expert understanding of REST, SOAP, JSON, XML, AMQP, and MQTT is required.
• Hands-on monitoring experience with IBM Instana, Dynatrace, or Prometheus/Grafana is listed.

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of middleware or integration support experience is required.
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field is required.
• The role requires the ability to debug asynchronous communication patterns and distributed transactions.

Preferred Certifications

• IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Specialist certification is preferred.
• Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration certification is preferred.

Key Performance Indicators

Work Model

• The work model prioritizes in-person collaboration while offering flexibility for wellbeing, productivity, individual work styles, and life circumstances.