Principal Engineer, SRE Middleware Architecture & Integrations

Overview

Principal Engineer, SRE Architecture for Middleware Architecture & Integrations. Design, implement and maintain highly available, scalable and resilient middleware infrastructure spanning messaging, caching and integration layers across AWS, GCP and OCI, providing technical leadership in event-driven architecture, message brokers, caching strategies and API management frameworks.

What you'll do

• Design and architect resilient, scalable middleware infrastructure across cloud and hybrid environments with an integration-first mindset covering reliability, availability and performance.
• Architect and operate Kafka clusters, RabbitMQ brokers and Redis caching layers with focus on self-healing, auto-scaling and platform resilience.
• Design, build and govern API Gateways (e.g., Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Dell Bhoomi) covering routing, rate limiting, authentication and traffic management for internal and external integrations.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code for middleware components using Terraform, Ansible and Helm across AWS, GCP and OCI environments, driving zero-touch provisioning and configuration management.
• Conduct performance tuning, capacity planning and load testing on messaging and caching layers to proactively identify bottlenecks and ensure systems scale reliably under peak demand.
• Collaborate with development and platform teams to embed integration patterns, security and operational standards into CI/CD pipelines and the software delivery lifecycle.
• Drive chaos engineering and resilience testing initiatives on middleware components to validate system behaviour under failure conditions and continuously harden the platform.
• Establish and enforce middleware best practices, runbooks and playbooks, standardising operational procedures and reducing toil through automation.
• Mentor and upskill junior engineers on middleware architecture, event-driven design and integration best practices.

What you'll need

• 14+ years of overall experience with a minimum of 6 years in Middleware/Integration Architecture, operating in large-scale, high-availability and mission-critical environments.
• Proven track record designing and operating distributed messaging systems, with deep expertise in Apache Kafka (cluster design, partitioning, replication, schema registry) and RabbitMQ (exchanges, queues, clustering, HA).
• Understanding of Redis: caching strategies, cluster/sentinel topologies, persistence and performance tuning at scale.
• Strong hands-on expertise with API Gateways (e.g., Kong, Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Azure APIM): API lifecycle management, security, rate limiting and traffic governance.
• Deep expertise in integration architecture: event-driven design, pub/sub patterns, ESB/iPaaS concepts, and third-party/partner (MNO, vendor) integrations.
• Strong hands-on expertise across AWS, GCP and OCI: cloud-native architecture, hybrid cloud operations and infrastructure optimisation at scale.
• Proficient in Infrastructure-as-Code and automation using Terraform, Ansible and Helm, driving zero-touch provisioning, configuration management and GitOps workflows.
• Expert in incident management and reliability operations for middleware: leading high-severity incident response, blameless post-mortems, RCA and systematic elimination of repeat failures.
• Hands-on experience with chaos engineering and resilience validation, proactively testing failure modes and hardening messaging/caching systems against real-world degradation.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor and grow architecture/engineering teams, establishing engineering standards, runbooks, playbooks and a culture of operational excellence.
• Hands-on experience with project and delivery management tooling such as JIRA, with strong ability to manage priorities across concurrent integration initiatives.
• Outstanding analytical, problem-solving and communication skills, with ability to translate complex integration challenges into clear architectural decisions and stakeholder narratives.

Nice to have

• Not specified as preferred in the source.

Details

• Location: India.
• Works with co-founders and HODs, engineering teams, and external customers/MNOs and vendors.