Principal Platform Engineer - Middleware

9:00 am - 5:30 pm (7.5 hours/day) or as required

This position is eligible for teleworking, which is currently 2 days per week. New hires are eligible to apply 30 days after their effective date of hire.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is North America's largest transportation network, serving a population of 15.3 million people across a 5,000-square-mile travel area surrounding New York City, Long Island, southeastern New York State, and Connecticut. The MTA network comprises the nation’s largest bus fleet and more subway and commuter rail cars than all other U.S. transit systems combined. MTA strives to provide a safe and reliable commute, excellent customer service, and rewarding opportunities.

The MTA transportation network has a very large system and infrastructure for financial, business, automated train, transportation, power, and physical security. The MTA IT Department is centrally responsible for providing a full range of Information and Operational Technology services to the MTA agencies and administrative units through its operating and support units. Services are provided on a 24/7/365 basis in support of the MTA organization and its ridership.

MTA IT’s Product Development group is empowered; multi-functional teams focused on the end-to-end management of development products from strategy to delivery. Using innovative processes and tools, the teams are responsible for developing and maintaining highly effective, secure, and innovative transportation, operational, and back-end information systems to support MTA goals and priorities.

The Principal Platform Engineer plays a critical role in ensuring the stability, scalability, and continuous improvement of our enterprise service‑management capabilities. As the MTA expands its reliance on digital workflows and automation, the demand for a dedicated engineering resource to support, enhance, and optimize enterprise‑wide platforms has become essential toward reducing the MTA IT department’s reliance on a managed service provider.

This role provides technical and strategic leadership across the full software development lifecycle for high‑impact, complex systems supporting critical business and operational functions. This role supports, coordinates, and manages IT Service Management platforms and collaborates with other IT teams to ensure successful project implementation. This role diagnoses problems and provides recommendations to improve existing and new systems. This role serves as the technical owner for assigned enterprise platforms, accountable for platform architecture, configuration, performance optimization, integrations, and long‑term platform strategy.

• Experience supporting enterprise middleware platforms supporting mission‑critical systems (Oracle Web Logic, OHS, OTD, Web Sphere, Tomcat)
• Experience with support of secure access architectures using Oracle Access Manager (OAM) for SSO and federation
• Experience with working with F5 BIG‑IP (LTM/GSLB) for load balancing, SSL offload, and high‑availability traffic management
• Experience in supporting and understanding of end‑to‑end application flows (F5 → web tier → middleware → backend), including session persistence and headers
• Experience supporting and middleware platforms using Red Hat Open Shift (OSD/ROSA) and cloud (AWS/OCI) with containerized workloads
• Strong experience in troubleshooting complex distributed systems, including network/MTU issues, SSL/TLS errors, and session behavior
• Experience building and implementing infrastructure automation (Terraform, Ansible) across hybrid on‑prem and cloud environments
• Experience developing and supporting CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Git Hub) for middleware deployment and lifecycle management
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with Infrastructure, Security, Network, and Application teams to drive stability and modernization

• Serves as a technical resource for multiple components of the enterprise platforms to help identify the best technical solutions.
• Troubleshoot platform issues within assigned areas, isolating and resolving faults that technology interdependencies may complicate.
• Design…