Senior Infrastructure Specialist

JOB TITLE: Senior Infrastructure Specialist 

SALARY: £72,702 - £80,780 

LOCATION(S): Leeds and Manchester 

HOURS:  Full time 

WORKING PATTERN: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) at one of the above office locations. Please note that participation in an on-call rota is also a requirement of this role. 

About this Opportunity

Lloyds Banking Group is modernising through cloud technology, creating platforms that are secure, resilient and simpler for engineering teams to adopt and manage.

We’re looking for an experienced IBM MQ Infrastructure Specialist to join our Private Cloud Platform team, bringing deep technical expertise to lead the design and evolution of our enterprise messaging and middleware services.

You’ll join an established Middleware Engineering team responsible for critical middleware services across our Private Cloud estate. IBM MQ is at the heart of the role, combining hands-on engineering and operational responsibility with helping us modernise through automation, modern engineering practices and increased adoption of containerisation and Red Hat OpenShift.

What you’ll be doing

• 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.
• Apply platform engineering and everything-as-code practices, including CI/CD, to enable secure, repeatable build, deployment and lifecycle management.
• Act as a middleware technical authority, leading technical conversations with stakeholders, partners, vendors and senior leaders.
• 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.

Why join us? 

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces, and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone. 

What we're looking for 

We’re looking for someone with significant hands-on experience engineering and supporting IBM MQ in large-scale enterprise environments. 

 Essential skills and experience: 

• Deep technical knowledge of IBM MQ architecture and distributed messaging, including queue managers, channels and clustering.
• Strong experience securing MQ through TLS, certificates, authentication, authorisation and secure configuration.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex infrastructure, performance and application-connectivity issues.
• 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.

Any experience of these would be really useful: 

• Experience with other enterprise middleware, particularly IBM WebSphere Application Server or IBM DataPower.
• Containers and enterprise platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift or Kubernetes, including Operators, containerised IBM MQ and relevant certification.
• 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.
• Operating critical middleware across VMware, private or hybrid cloud environments, including incident management, resilience, backup and disaster recovery.
• Agile, cross-disciplinary engineering experience, including mentoring colleagues, improving standards and modernising traditional middleware

This is a place for you 

Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities and we’re committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop. 

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer Initiative. 

We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. And, as a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role with a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition through the Disability Confident Scheme. 

We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need. 

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes: 

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15% 

• An annual performance related bonus 

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping 

• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top 

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies 

Ready to make an impact? Apply today.