VP, Kafka Platform Manager

Lead with Purpose, Unlock Your Team’s Passion At LPL, people leaders hold the key to the employee experience — shaping culture, driving performance, and guiding individuals to new heights. Because when that happens, we all win – clients, LPL, and most importantly our, employees. If you're ready to lead with intention and discover what’s possible, LPL Financial invites you to apply today.

We have an exciting opportunity to join our Technology organization as VP, Middleware Engineering manager. In this role, you will be responsible for leading support and operations of Kafka and Swagger Hub platforms.

• Manage mission critical Kafka messaging, streaming and integration platforms powering advisory platforms.
• Lead Kafka Middleware Platform Engineering Operations for both on premise and cloud-based platforms.
• Develop a high-performing platform team, handle financial planning, vendor management, contract negotiations.
• Devise strategy, roadmaps, and operational metrics for Kafka platforms.
• Manage incident resolutions, platform upgrades, maintenance and drive automation for Kafka and Swagger Hub platforms.
• Help application teams onboard to messaging platforms.
• Deliver internal automations and self-service capabilities for the developer community.
• Install, manage, and maintain messaging platforms.
• Consolidate platforms into cloud and maintain operational hygiene.
• Contribute to integrating these platforms into a common management approach using Dev Sec Ops  and infrastructure-as-code pipelines and principles.
• Establish feedback loops that ensure continuous improvement and prioritization of the highest value customer needs.
• Leverage common tools, such as Jira and Service Now, for capturing, tracking, assigning, and planning demand/work.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of high-performing outcome-oriented engineers, including onshore, nearshore, and offshore personnel.
• Collaborate across the firm to maintain alignment on vision, strategy, and performance to goals, approaching strategy with an entrepreneurial mindset, leveraging critical thinking to increase the value proposition of assigned products and programs.

• 5-7 years of developing, cultivating, and leading strong, high-performing Kafka platform teams.
• 4+ years in platform engineering and management involving Middleware technologies.
• 5+ years delivering and operating in an Agile/Kanban model where dependency management and priority trade-off conversations are key to successful execution.
• 5-7 years of experience with Cloud technologies, architecture, Dev Sec Ops  and Infrastructure-as-code engineering and integration, including Terraform, Ansible, and platform management automation tools and technologies.
• 2+ years activating and managing high-performing 24x7 support teams.

• Demonstrated Expertise (“DE”) managing middleware messaging platforms (Confluent Kafka) and in Public Clouds (AWS or Azure or GCP, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).
• DE creating CI/CD deployment of DevOPS tools (Ansible, Chef and Jenkins) to automate provisioning and remove manual steps.
• DE building integration for applications to Middleware tools, including Confluent Kafka ,IBM Message Brokers, and Message Gateways.
• DE integrating different databases (Oracle, Postgres, and Microsoft SQL server) using middleware/integration technologies.
• DE setting up enterprise grade monitoring solutions using one of Dynatrace ,Splunk, New Relic, and Nagios.
• DE handling Linux based deployments and troubleshooting issues using Scripting tools (Shell Scripting, Python, Perl, and Ansible).
• DE performing capacity assessment, maintaining operational hygiene, conducting High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) setups, requirements handling, delivering and…