Senior Infrastructure Specialist

End Date Thursday 22 October 2026 Salary Range £72,702 - £80,780. Flexible Working Options Hybrid Working, Job Share.

Senior Infrastructure Specialist

Leeds and Manchester

Full time

Hybrid, 40% (or two days) at one of the above office locations. Please note that participation in an on‑call rota is also a requirement of this role.

Lloyds Banking Group is modernising through cloud technology, creating platforms that are secure, resilient and simpler for engineering teams to adopt and manage. We’re looking for an experienced IBM MQ Infrastructure Specialist to join our Private Cloud Platform team, bringing deep technical expertise to lead the design and evolution of our enterprise messaging and middleware services. You’ll join an established Middleware Engineering team responsible for critical middleware services across our Private Cloud estate.

IBM MQ is at the heart of the role, combining hands‑on engineering and operational responsibility with helping us modernise through automation, modern engineering practices and increased adoption of containerisation and Red Hat Open Shift.

• Lead the design and evolution of IBM MQ and wider middleware services across VMware and Red Hat Open Shift platforms, driving the appropriate adoption of containerisation and Operator‑based deployment.
• Apply platform engineering and everything‑as‑code practices, including CI/CD, to enable secure, repeatable build, deployment and lifecycle management.
• Act as a middleware technical authority, leading technical conversations with stakeholders, partners, vendors and senior leaders.
• Champion automation, resilience, observability and security‑by‑design across middleware services.
• Mentor colleagues, share specialist knowledge and help raise engineering standards and capability across the wider Private Cloud platform.

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone.

We’re looking for someone with significant hands‑on experience engineering and supporting IBM MQ in large‑scale enterprise environments.

• Deep technical knowledge of IBM MQ architecture and distributed messaging, including queue managers, channels and clustering.
• Strong experience securing MQ through TLS, certificates, authentication, authorisation and secure configuration.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex infrastructure, performance and application‑connectivity issues.
• Experience across the full MQ lifecycle, from design and installation through configuration, patching, upgrades and ongoing platform management.
• Understanding of enterprise security, risk, change and operational controls, with effective communication across infrastructure, application and platform teams.

• Experience with other enterprise middleware, particularly IBM Web Sphere Application Server or IBM Data Power.
• Containers and enterprise platforms such as Red Hat Open Shift or Kubernetes, including Operators, containerised IBM MQ and relevant certification.
• Automation, CI/CD, source control and Git Ops using tools such as Git, Git Hub, Jenkins, Harness, Ansible, Python or Bash.
• Monitoring and observability with tools such as Dynatrace, Prometheus or Grafana.
• Operating critical middleware across VMware, private or hybrid cloud environments, including incident management, resilience, backup and disaster recovery.
• Agile, cross‑disciplinary engineering experience, including mentoring colleagues, improving standards and modernising traditional…