Observability & Middleware Platforms Engineering Leader; Hybrid

Position: Observability & Middleware Platforms Engineering Leader (Hybrid)
## Observability & Middleware Platforms Engineering Leader (Hybrid)
Apply locations:
Saint Paul, MN Campus time type:
Full time posted on:
Posted 2 Days Agojob requisition :
R-010597
** At Securian Financial the internal position title is Infrastructure Sr Mgr.
* *** Mission Statement
** The Observability & Middleware Platforms team within the Platform & Reliability Engineering organization empowers Securian’s technology ecosystem by delivering reliable, scalable, and automated enterprise platforms. This team designs and delivers foundational capabilities which enable application hosting, integrations, messaging, mainframe, and deep observability insight across our technology landscape. Our mission includes ensuring all systems and applications are observable, performant, and ready to meet the needs of our customers and business.
** Role Purpose / Charter
** The Observability & Middleware Platform Engineering Leader is responsible for engineering and evolving Securian’s middleware technologies, mainframe, and observability backbone. This role leads a team of Engineers in defining and delivering on roadmaps for application hosting and runtime (e.g. Tomcat EC2 product and other Linux-based OS and apps, distributed batch environment), integrations and messaging (e.g. MQ, SQS, managed file transfer), mainframe, API platforms (Kong, Layer7), and enterprise observability platforms for logs, metrics, tracing, correlation, AIOps, Fin Ops, etc.

This leader ensures these technologies are well engineered, automated, optimized, and meet the needs of IT Operations and Technology Services teams, other teams in Platform & Reliability Engineering, Enterprise Cybersecurity, and application engineering teams throughout Enterprise Technology.
** Key Responsibilities
*** Lead the design, engineering, and growth of enterprise observability and AIOps capabilities, ensuring integrated telemetry across logs, metrics, traces, and events is automated and easy to adopt for all application and team needs.
* Drive adoption of standardized instrumentation (e.g., Open Telemetry) across infrastructure and application services.
* Partner with other Engineering teams in Platform & Reliability Engineering to ensure seamless integration of observability into all technology platforms and capabilities.
* Provide visibility into platform health, performance, and maturity through dashboards, KPIs, and executive reporting. Partner with IT Operations and Technology Services to ensure observability meets needs for operating and effectively running our IT environments.
* Lead the engineering and modernization of middleware solutions, including Workload Automation, Job Scheduling, Managed File Transfer (MFT), MQ, Tomcat on EC2 pattern, and other Linux & EC2 based applications and infrastructure.
* Lead the engineering and modernization of our API platforms – Kong and Layer
7.
* Own the lifecycle management, integration, and reliability of the mainframe platform (IBM z/OS). Drive modernization of these mainframe technologies in partnership with ET market teams and our business.
* Provide Level 3 support and expertise, supporting escalations from our Operations Level 1 and Level 2 teams.
* Ensure compliance, security, and resilience are built into all platform services.
* Lead a team of Engineers. Develop and mentor engineering associates to mature automation, platform operations, and observability practices.
* Continuously improve platform efficiency, cost optimization, and scalability. Manage the budget and licensing for all technologies in scope of the role.
** Required Capabilities & Skills
*** Demonstrated leadership skills in team development, collaboration and communication with leadership peers and executives, prioritization of team work, managing sizable technology budgets, and managing relationships with current and new technology vendors.
* Expertise in middleware, application hosting, integrations, messaging, and API capabilities.
* Deep expertise in observability platforms (AIOps, logs, metrics, traces, correlation pipelines, Open Telemetry, Dynatrace, Grafana, Prometheus).
* Strong grounding in infrastructure automation (IaC, Python, Terraform/Cloud…