Integration Specialist at KCB Bank Kenya

The Position

The Integration Specialist will be responsible for the overall availability, stability, scalability and security of the KCB integration landscape including KCB Red Hat OpenShift Cluster (OCP), API Managements, ESB Platform, and its suite of products and other integration services deployed within the bank.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide support for all Middleware/integration platforms and/or java container related issues and triage application issues as related to the J2EE container.
• Participate and guides in development, deployment, maintenance, and management of best-in-class enterprise systems & integration platforms for business-partner integrations and by third-party applications and services.
• Implementing high availability, fault tolerant strategies, and load balancing based on Integration platforms of products capabilities.
• Manage middleware environments and provide support to application support and business teams. The job holder will also participate in quality assurance activities for integration related solutions before they are transitioned to production.
• Work independently and collaboratively with other support teams to troubleshoot integration platforms, server performance issues and tune the environment based on findings to achieve desired outcomes.
• Collaborate with other software developers, business analysts and software architects to plan, design, assist in the collection and documentation of user’s requirements, development of user stories, estimates and work plans.
• Provide detailed incident reports and root cause analysis and suggest workarounds / interventions and/or solutions for recurring issues affecting Middleware applications. Continuously devise or modify procedures to solve complex and recurrent problems and maintaining a knowledge base of the known problems and solutions.
• Periodic or adhoc patching of the middleware application environments - applying maintenance updates such as fix packs to the broker/integration nodes and ensuring the whole environment is up to date in relation to patching.
• Monitoring all Middleware application environments - transactions, services, files transfers, operating system, database health and the environment in general and issue periodic consumable health status of the environment.
• Manage/action service requests raised directly or escalated to the middleware & integration support team and within the pre-determined SLA
• Document and implement integration service development governance and standards. This includes API standards, DevOps practices and cloud adoption. Coordinate releases of new products and services into production, ensure alignment of all stakeholders, review runbooks and change work instructions to ensure deployment as per plan while achieving non-functional and operational requirements.
• Maintain an up to date detailed configuration matrix for all middleware services and the integration landscape / environment.
• Provide input and implement a disaster recovery plan with run book and periodic planning for disaster recovery tests. Perform backup and recovery of the Middleware applications, and effectively support resolution of any post recovery issues. Maintaining the DR environment in ready state. In collaborations with other teams invoke fail over activities to the DR.

The Person

For the above position, the successful applicant should have the following:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology/ Computer Science/ or related field.
• A Professional Certification in Middleware or Integration.
• 5 years’ experience in Technology
• 4 years’ experience in Redhat Integrations, [ESB - SOA and web services concepts] and integration technologies coupled with complementary areas of knowledge.
• 4 years’ experience with messaging systems preferably RedHat MQ, AMQ, IBM MQ and messaging concepts and technologies.
• 3 years’ experience with DevSecOps, and CI/CD automation tools such as Jenkins, JMeter, Git, Stash, SonarQube, GitOps.
• 2 years’ experience in RDBMS working with large and high-performance databases such as Oracle, Mongo DB.
• Knowledge of Java, J2EE, XML, Redhat Openshift.