Engineer III - Middleware

What you can expect! 

Find joy in serving others with IEHP! We welcome you to join us in “healing and inspiring the human spirit” and to pivot from a “job” opportunity to an authentic experience!

The Engineer III - Middleware serves as a senior technical expert responsible for leading the design, implementation, and maintenance of IEHP’s middleware applications like Nginx, IIS, Kafka, Kubernetes, and others to enable secure, scalable, and reliable integration across systems. This role leads strategic middleware initiatives, including roadmap development, architecture design, and performance optimization, while ensuring compliance with security and regulatory standards. The Engineer III – Middleware provides technical leadership, oversees complex deployments, and collaborates with cross functional teams to deliver high-performing solutions that support organizational goals. Additionally, the incumbent utilizes their passion for debugging complex problems to manage incident resolution, capacity planning, and continuous improvement efforts to enhance middleware capabilities and operational efficiency. This role will also be responsible for production code release with the support of the IEHP’s Application Development teams

Commitment to Quality: The IEHP Team is committed to incorporate IEHP’s Quality Program goals including, but not limited to, HEDIS, CAHPS, and NCQA Accreditation.

Perks

IEHP is not only committed to healing and inspiring the human spirit of our Members, but we also aim to match our team members with the same energy by providing prime benefits and more.

• Competitive salary
• Hybrid schedule
• State of the art fitness center on-site
• Medical Insurance with Dental and Vision
• Life, short-term, and long-term disability options
• Career advancement opportunities and professional development
• Wellness programs that promote a healthy work-life balance
• Flexible Spending Account – Health Care/Childcare
• CalPERS retirement
• 457(b) option with a contribution match
• Paid life insurance for employees
• Pet care insurance

1. Lead the development and maintain a comprehensive roadmap for middleware initiatives, including business projects, application upgrades, core infrastructure upgrades, middleware platform upgrades (Kafka, Kubernetes, NGINX, etc.), compliance requirements, and operational improvements. Establish and include in roadmap compliance and operational items including functional and security patches, middleware managed server certificate refreshes, vulnerability remediation, platform upgrades and changes. Establish and include middleware improvements (e.g., log file rotation, automation) in the roadmap.
2. Provide technical leadership and subject matter expertise in middleware applications’/products’ architecture, configuration, development, product capabilities, and deployment. Lead middleware definition requirements and ensure adherence to best practices and middleware security controls. 
3. Coordinate middleware efforts across teams, manage task assignments, and ensure timely delivery of project requirements. Provide inputs for middleware backlog prioritization including, analysis and assessment of epics/stories, SWAG / estimates, identify dependencies and story sequencing and participate in feature deep-dive working sessions and meetings.
4. Perform installation, configuration, performance tuning, capacity planning, optimization review, troubleshooting, and design for large, complex middleware platforms across multiple environments and platforms. Perform system monitoring to ensure system operation health to meet service level agreements.
5. Support Business-As-Usual (BAU) activities, respond to alerts and service interruptions, and provide 24/7 on-call support to minimize disruptions, restore functionality, and support customers. Execute production releases of software updates/new functionality in partnership with application development teams. Interact with system and storage teams to perform back-up and recovery procedures for ensuring business continuity.
6. Implement and maintain middleware controls, manage vulnerability remediation, certificate refreshes, and patching. Develop and maintain documentation to support middleware infrastructure and processes.
7. Maintain effective communication with vendors, systems support teams, local teams, end users, and next level management. Provide technical consulting and support integration efforts to ensure business continuity.
8. Identify and implement middleware enhancements such as automation and log management.
9. Investigate middleware and integration issues to provide resolutions and to develop root cause analyses for supporting maintenance improvements and upgrade planning.
10. Develop, enhance, debug, support, maintain, and test software applications and associated products.
11. Participate in peer reviews for designs, code, and other work products.
12. Monitor the IT Service Management System to resolve customer issues and meet service expectations.
13. Manages middleware team tasks to meet project requirements.
14. Perform any other duties as required to ensure Health Plan operations and department business needs are successful.

Education & Requirements 

•  A minimum of eight (8) years of experience in a combination of the following:
  • Middleware applications like Kafka, IIS, Tomcat, WebSphere, performance tuning and managing them in clustered environments
  • Container orchestration and automation tools, with a strong focus on Kubernetes and Helm for managing deployments, scaling, and configuration of microservices in production environments
  • Executing scripts and independently performing troubleshooting on Linux and/or Unix (RHEL/Solaris) operating systems
• Bachelor’s degree with a major in Computer related field or similar technical field from an accredited institution required

Key Qualifications

• Must have a valid California Driver's License
• Expert comprehensive knowledge and understanding in the following:
  • Installing, configuring, administering, implementing and performance tuning clustered Middleware environments
  • Writing UNIX Shell Scripts (Korn, Bourne), WLST and Python Scripts
  • The JVM and how it operates and optimize it for best performance and availability, i.e., Garbage Collection, Tuning, etc
  • DevOps toolsets such as Jenkins, Kubernetes, Docker etc. desirable
  • AZURE or any other cloud technologies
• Strong planning, organization, critical thinking, decision-making, and communication (verbal and written) skills
• Skills in root cause analysis and rapid resolution of service interruptions
• Strong analytical skills for performance tuning and optimization
• Proven ability to:
  • Work effectively with application development, infrastructure, and security teams
  • Manage projects, ensuring timely delivery and alignment with organizational goals
  • Lead initiatives, provide guidance to junior staff, and influence architectural decisions
  • Communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders

Start your journey towards a thriving future with IEHP and apply TODAY!

This position is on a hybrid work schedule. (Mon & Fri - remote, Tues - Thurs onsite in Rancho Cucamonga, CA)