Location: Sheffield
Work Setup: 60% office 40% home
Duration: 31/05/2027
Rate £490 - £538
CONTRACTOR MUST BE ELIGIBLE FOR BPSS
UMBRELLA
Role Description:
Principal responsibilities:
Define and maintain a multi-quarter product roadmap covering currency, resilience, security improvements, automation and consumer experience.
Own platform lifecycle management across the estate: standard versions, upgrade plans, deprecation/exit strategy, and technical debt prioritization.Shape and priorities demand using transparent criteria (risk reduction, service stability, regulatory requirements, cost, and customer impact).
Set and maintain standards and reference patterns for:
IBM MQ (configuration baselines, connectivity patterns, TLS/mTLS, authorization, auditing/logging).
ACE (integration patterns, deployment/runtime standards, operational governance).
ITX (map governance, version control, runtime deployment and controls).
ITM/Instana (monitoring coverage, alert policy, dashboards, noise reduction standards).
Lead governance forums to manage exceptions, reduce fragmentation, and improve time-to-deliver for consuming teams.
Maintain product documentation and service catalogue entries, ensuring clarity on "what's supported" and "how to consume".
Be accountable for service health outcomes: availability, stability, performance, capacity and resilience.
Define and track SLIs/SLOs and KPIs (incident trends, MTTR, change failure rate, platform performance indicators).
Drive operational excellence through:
Major incident review leadership and root cause elimination
Problem management, reliability engineering initiatives and runbook maturity
Ensure DR/HA expectations are defined, tested, and evidenced.
Success measures (example KPIs):Reduction in high-severity incidents and repeat issues; improved MTTR.
% estate on supported versions (MQ/ACE/ITX) and patch/vulnerability compliance within agreed timelines.
Monitoring/observability coverage via ITM/Instana; reduced alert noise and increased actionable alert rate.
Demonstrable cost optimization (license efficiency, consolidation outcomes).
Delivery of roadmap commitments on time with clear consumer satisfaction feedback.
Skills & experience:
Strong experience in product/service management for enterprise platforms (middleware, integration, messaging, monitoring/observability), ideally in a regulated environment
Deep knowledge of IBM MQ and solid working knowledge of ACE, ITX and observability tools (ITM/Instana or equivalent).
Proven track record in platform lifecycle management (upgrade programs, standardization, deprecation, tech debt).
Strong operational mindset: incident/problem management, capacity planning, resilience (HA/DR), SLI/SLO-based performance management.
Strong stakeholder management and ability to influence across multiple teams and senior stakeholders.
Experience managing large-scale, multi-region deployments of messaging/integration/observability platforms across multiple geographies and time zones, including operating model alignment (follow-the-sun support), standardization across regions, and managing regional regulatory/latency constraints.
Proven delivery experience with IBM MQ in a complex enterprise estate (hundreds/thousands of queue managers or large application population)
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Salary description
£480.00 - £530.00 per day