Senior Middleware Administrator - Military Veterans

MassMutual Ascend is committed to helping people plan for a secure retirement in an uncomplicated way. Our simple promise is superior service and annuities that are easier to understand. This means offering innovative products that fit with today’s needs. As a wholly owned subsidiary of MassMutual, MassMutual Ascend functions with the agility of a small company and the assurance of being associated with a Fortune 200 organization who is proud to offer customers a level of strength and stability they can count on for years to come.

The Opportunity

As a Senior Middleware Administrator, you will be a part of a tight-knit, and collaborative operations team that covers a wide range of technologies. On this team, you will work alongside hard-working colleagues in an environment that is focused on ensuring application uptime for our Agents and Customers. We continue maturing our Cloud opportunistic model, as well as automated deployments. We do this while remaining complaint and security focused. The end goal, which is continuously evolving and presenting new challenges, is the digital user experience. The work has a wide range from driving our application implementations, standardizations, and working with others on updated designs. You will partner with cross-functional teams to design, develop, test, and implement applications, services, and assist with infrastructure. You will also monitor and tune systems and processes to achieve optimal IT service performance, stability, and security.  You will engage our IT services teams and Hosting provider, liaison with Security and Development teams to implement new solutions, ensuring uptime 24x7x365. In this role you will also provide expertise during critical outage events and be a SME for all things related to Infrastructure. This is not a hardware or datacenter system administrator role, but requires the skills learned doing high level OS administration.

Job Responsibilities

• Accountable for leading the planning, design, and engineering of applications, enterprise-level, infrastructure, and services.


• IT deployments involving internally hosted services, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).


• Leverage significant experience in system engineering and integration to support services critical to a fast paced and demanding environment.


• Design and implement solutions with an eye towards simplicity, reliability, manageability, maintainability, and performance.


• Provide technical expertise in the areas of implementation, and ongoing operations.


• Learn new technologies, applications, tools, and skills as needed.


• Being influential and engaging actively in dynamic and productive teams to continuously improve systems and services.


• Identify service and performance issues, and work with team to devise solutions to mitigate and address these issues.


• Mentor and guide others who are still developing their skills.


• This involves an on-call rotation.

Minimum Qualifications

• Previous experience in administering and monitoring systems (Win & Linux)


• At least 10 years operations experience in 24x7x365 application environments


• At least 5 years working closely with development teams on software and deployments.


• Previous experience with Kubernetes/containers or VMWare


• Previous experience with hardware, integration, communications technology, as well as other emerging services across multiple platforms.


• BS in Computer Sciences or equivalent on the job experience


• Wide breadth of understanding in infrastructure, networks, systems, security, and services


• Self-motivated team player who excels in a collaborative environment

Ideal Qualifications

• Comfortable working within an Agile development methodology


• Strong sense of personal accountability


• Contributes beyond job role and responsibilities.


• Excellent problem-solving skills


• Ability to learn and apply new technologies quickly and self-directed.


• Passionate about continuously improving organizational practices.

What to Expect

• Ongoing opportunities for development and learning


• Working in a fast-paced environment in our downtown Cincinnati, OH office


• A place to grow your career in a culture that inspires, rewards, and develops employees.


• Small company feel with a focus on meeting customer’s needs today and well into the future.

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