Senior IBM MQ Engineer

Location: Annapolis Junction, MD

Schedule: Full-time | Onsite

Clearance: Active Secret clearance required

Salary Range: $130,000–$150,000 annually

The Opportunity

We are hiring an experienced Senior IBM MQ Engineer to support mission-critical systems where reliable, secure messaging is essential to ongoing operations.

In this role, you’ll take a hands-on lead in designing, implementing, and maintaining IBM MQ infrastructure. You’ll work across messaging architecture, high availability, performance tuning, security, and application integration while helping ensure critical systems remain reliable and scalable.

This position is onsite in Annapolis Junction, Maryland and supports an environment requiring 24x7x365 uptime.

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement, and maintain IBM MQ infrastructure, including queue managers, channels, queues, and other MQ objects.
• Configure and administer MQ clustering, multi-instance queue managers, and high-availability solutions to support message reliability and fault tolerance.
• Monitor and analyze MQ performance, identify bottlenecks, optimize configurations, and tune MQ settings to improve efficiency.
• Provide technical guidance to application developers and assist with integrating applications into the MQ messaging environment.
• Protect the security and integrity of the MQ infrastructure through appropriate access controls, encryption, and auditing mechanisms.
• Perform capacity planning and forecasting to support the scalability and performance of the MQ environment.
• Keep current with IBM MQ versions, patches, technical developments, and industry best practices, recommending upgrades and improvements when appropriate.
• Develop and maintain documentation covering technical configurations, operational procedures, and troubleshooting processes.
• Perform other assigned responsibilities as needed.

What You’ll Bring

• An active Secret security clearance.
• U.S. citizenship. Due to contract requirements, candidates with dual citizenship cannot be considered.
• 12+ years of relevant work experience.
• 5+ years of Unix experience.
• 5+ years of DevOps / Infrastructure as Code (IaC) experience.
• Ability to reside within a commutable distance of Annapolis Junction, MD for daily onsite work and on-call requirements.
• Willingness and ability to support systems requiring 24x7x365 uptime, including meeting on-call requirements and participating in a rotational on-call schedule if required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience.
• IBM System Administrator certification for MQ.
• Ability to work effectively as part of a team while also operating proactively and independently.
• Ability to learn quickly and support mission-critical operations across geographically diverse locations.

Compensation

The annual salary range for this position is $130,000–$150,000.