Senior Associate - Middleware Engineer

Location Designation:  Hybrid - 3 days per quarter

Technology, Data, AI and Ventures:

Within the Tech, Data, AI, Ventures (TDAV) organization, our work is guided by a shared vision: deploying the power of technology, data, AI and ventures to accelerate sustainable competitive advantage for New York Life's businesses. We build solutions that power how we serve policy owners, agents, advisors and employees while delivering measurable business outcomes.

Across technology, data, AI, cyber, product, digital experience, architecture and infrastructure, TDAV combines the scale and investment of an industry leader, access to leading-edge technologies and the opportunity to help shape how a world-class financial services company competes in the AI era - all backed by the stability and purpose of a mutual company built to last.

Role Summary

Serve as a senior engineering owner for New York Life's enterprise middleware platforms. You will engineer, operate, harden, and modernize the runtime and integration services that support critical applications across private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid environments. Your work will improve availability, security, observability, recoverability, and automation while establishing consistent platform patterns that application teams can consume safely and efficiently.

What You'll Do

Run & Harden the Platform

- Operate and maintain enterprise middleware platforms and supporting components across development, test, and production environments.
- Implement upgrades, patches, configuration changes, certificate renewals, and lifecycle activities in line with platform standards and change governance.
- Manage capacity, performance, availability, and supportability so critical application services remain stable and production-ready.

Engineer Reliability & Resilience

- Design and implement clustering, load balancing, failover, recovery, and disaster-recovery patterns for mission-critical middleware services.
- Reduce single points of failure and configuration drift through standardized architecture, resilient patterns, and repeatable validation.
- Perform reliability and performance engineering to strengthen service continuity, scalability, and recovery readiness.

Automate & Standardize

- Develop reusable automation for provisioning, configuration, patching, validation, certificate management, and routine platform operations.
- Manage platform configurations as code using version control and CI/CD-based promotion where appropriate.
- Define standard builds, templates, runbooks, and self-service patterns that reduce manual effort and accelerate consistent delivery.

Guardrails, Health & Service Readiness

- Implement pre- and post-deployment checks, synthetic probes, health validations, and operational-readiness criteria for middleware services.
- Define and maintain service level indicators and objectives for availability, performance, recoverability, and operational responsiveness.
- Build safeguards that detect configuration drift, expiring dependencies, capacity constraints, and other risks before they affect applications.

Observability & Operational Excellence

- Integrate middleware platforms with enterprise logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and dashboard capabilities.
- Tune alerts and thresholds to improve signal quality, speed diagnosis, and reduce unnecessary operational noise.
- Analyze recurring incidents and manual activities, then engineer durable fixes that reduce toil and improve platform reliability.

Security, Change & Incident Coordination

- Apply secure configuration baselines, access controls, encryption, certificate and secrets practices, and vulnerability-remediation standards.
- Coordinate platform maintenance, releases, and changes with application teams and established change-management processes.
- Lead incident triage and root-cause analysis for middleware failures and drive corrective actions through completion.

Partner & Influence Across Teams

- Collaborate with application owners, developers, SRE, cloud, network, cybersecurity, database, architecture, and vendor teams to keep services healthy and compliant.
- Provide technical guidance on platform patterns, deployment design, performance, resilience, and production readiness.
- Document standards, playbooks, and architecture patterns; mentor peers and junior engineers and contribute to platform roadmaps.

What You'll Bring:

- 7-10+ years of experience in enterprise middleware, application infrastructure, platform engineering, SRE, or production operations supporting mission-critical services.
- Hands-on experience with one or more enterprise middleware platform categories, including:

Operating application runtime, web, messaging, integration, or API-related platform components across multiple environments.
- Implementing clustering, load balancing, failover, secure configuration, and recovery patterns for high-availability services.

- Strong scripting and automation skills in PowerShell, Bash, or Python, plus familiarity with YAML/JSON and REST APIs.
- Experience with Git-based workflows, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure or configuration as code, and automated promotion practices.
- Strong understanding of certificates, secrets, privileged access, vulnerability remediation, patching, performance tuning, capacity planning, and lifecycle management.
- Experience integrating platforms with observability tools and defining meaningful health, availability, performance, and recovery measures.
- Excellent coordination skills across incident, problem, release, and change processes, with clear communication to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to Have

- Experience in financial services, insurance, or another highly regulated industry.
- Experience with public cloud, private cloud, container platforms, or modern platform-engineering and SRE operating models.
- Relevant certifications in cloud, middleware, Linux/Windows administration, ITIL, SRE, or cybersecurity disciplines.

How Success Will Be Measured

- Improved middleware availability, recovery readiness, and mean time to restore service; fewer recurring incidents and production defects.
- Increased percentage of platform provisioning, patching, configuration, validation, and certificate activities executed through automation.
- Improved version and patch currency, vulnerability-remediation timeliness, configuration consistency, and audit-readiness.
- Reduced manual interventions and alert noise, with greater adoption of standard patterns, dashboards, runbooks, and self-service capabilities.

Working Model

Hybrid role based in New York, NY with periodic on-site participation for planning, platform releases, incident reviews, and key service events. Participation in an on-call rotation or occasional off-hours support may be required for critical incidents, maintenance, upgrades, or disaster-recovery exercises. You will work within clear governance, established change processes, and close cross-technology collaboration to

Job Level: LEVELPF4

Pay Transparency

Salary Range: $111,500-$159,000

Overtime eligible: Exempt

Discretionary bonus eligible: Yes

Sales bonus eligible: No

Actual base salary will be determined based on several factors but not limited to individual’s experience, skills, qualifications, and job location. Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program.

Company Overview

At New York Life, our 180-year legacy of purpose and integrity fuels our future. As we evolve into a more technology-, data-, and AI-enabled organization, we remain grounded in the values that drive lasting impact.

Our diverse business portfolio creates opportunities to make a difference across industries and communities—inviting bold thinking, collaborative problem-solving, and purpose-driven innovation. Here, you’ll find the rare balance of long-standing stability and forward momentum, supported by an inclusive team that honors tradition while embracing progress.

As a Fortune 100 mutual company, we offer a place to grow your skills, contribute to meaningful work, and deliver solutions that matter. Your ideas drive what’s next, and your growth powers it.

Our Benefits

We provide a full package of benefits for employees – and have unique offerings for a modern workforce, including leave programs, adoption assistance, and student loan repayment programs. Based on feedback from our employees, we continue to refine and add benefits to our offering, so that you can flourish both inside and outside of work. Click here to discover more about our comprehensive benefit options or visit our NYL Benefits Site .

Our Commitment to Inclusion

At New York Life, fostering an inclusive workplace is fundamental to who we are and how we serve our communities. We have a longstanding commitment to creating an environment where individuals can contribute their best and succeed together. This foundation is rooted in our core values of humanity and integrity, ensuring that every employee feels valued and supported. By embracing a broad range of perspectives and experiences, we achieve greater success and fulfill our promise of providing financial security and peace of mind to families across all communities.  Click here to learn more about New York Life’s leadership in this space.​

Recognized as one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and volunteerism, supported by the  Foundation . We're proud that due to our mutuality, we operate in the best interests of our policy owners. To learn more about career opportunities at New York Life, please visit the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com .

Job Requisition ID: 95383