Sr Rabbit Mq Engineer

Position:  Sr Rabbit MQ Engineer
Location: Remote
Duration: 6 months Contract

Client: Dicks Sporting/Presidio

Role Summary
We need a Senior RabbitMQ Engineer (SME), located in USA (eastern side preferred) to support a customer engagement at Dick’s Sporting Goods. This is a hands-on, staff-augmentation role that combines architecture, technical leadership, and execution. The resource will act as the single-threaded RabbitMQ authority assessing the current platform, stabilizing it quickly, and guiding the customer toward a supported, resilient RabbitMQ posture in Azure (VMs and/or AKS). The engagement would be for 6 months.

Primary outcome: Stabilize RabbitMQ by April / early May and deliver a clear modernization recommendation (AKS vs VM-based vs SaaS) with a practical execution path.

Engagement Context
•    Customer is targeting Azure (directionally aligned, not fully confirmed)
•    RabbitMQ supports multiple product teams; each team owns its vhosts/tenants
•    Platform has tech debt (notably DR process not functioning as expected)
•    Current deployment includes 3-node clusters across Dev / Non-Prod / Prod
•    Configuration is Ansible cookbook-driven, but is bespoke per product team
•    Peak business load window: November

Responsibilities
1) Assessment & Stabilization (Immediate)
•    Perform current-state review: topology, broker configuration, policies, queue types, client connection patterns, resource thresholds.
•    Identify reliability/performance risks and execute prioritized remediation.
•    Establish “good” operational standards: monitoring, alerting, runbooks, on-call readiness.
2) Architecture & Technical Direction
•    Define target-state options and tradeoffs: Azure VMs vs AKS vs SaaS.
•    Provide an upgrade strategy to a supported RabbitMQ version (sequencing, rollout, rollback).
•    Recommend best practices for multi-tenant RabbitMQ (vhosts, permissions, policy boundaries).
3) DR / Resiliency Improvements
•    Diagnose why DR isn’t working; propose and implement pragmatic recovery posture aligned to business requirements.
•    Validate failover/recovery procedures through testing and documentation.
4) Platform Enablement & Standardization
•    Improve maintainability of Ansible-based configuration and reduce bespoke patterns.
•    Create/tune reusable “gold standard” patterns for vhost provisioning, policies, and operational controls.
•    Coach customer engineers; transfer knowledge and operational ownership.

Required Skills & Experience (Must-Have)
•    7–10+ years in distributed systems / messaging platforms; expert-level RabbitMQ in production.
•    Strong experience with:
o    clustering and HA patterns (quorum queues / mirrored strategies where applicable)
o    performance tuning (memory watermarks, disk alarms, flow control, channel/connection behaviors)
o    upgrades and lifecycle management (zero/minimal downtime approaches, rollback planning)
o    incident triage and root cause analysis in high-throughput environments
•    Azure operational experience (networking, VM patterns; AKS familiarity strongly preferred)
•    Hands-on automation experience (Ansible or similar IaC/config management)
•    Ability to operate as a technical lead: clear decision-making, documentation, stakeholder comms.

Preferred / Nice-to-Have
•    Designing DR for messaging in cloud (active/passive and/or multi-region approaches)
•    Experience integrating messaging with enterprise integration stacks (e.g., BizTalk patterns)

Deliverables
•    Current-state assessment + prioritized stabilization plan
•    Implemented stability improvements (config/tuning/operational guardrails)
•    Supported version upgrade plan (and execution, if in-scope)
•    DR gap analysis + implemented/tested recovery procedures
•    AKS vs VM vs SaaS recommendation with risk/effort tradeoffs
•    Standardized configuration approach for vhosts/policies + documentation/runbooks

Candidate Profile
•    “Player/Coach”: can architect and still get hands dirty fast.
•    Strong executive communication: can explain tradeoffs and risk in plain English.
•    Bias for practical outcomes: stabilize first, modernize second, document always.