Senior RabbitMQ Engineer / SME

Role Summary
We need a Senior RabbitMQ Engineer (SME), located in USA (eastern side preferred) to support one of our customers. 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:
  • clustering and HA patterns (quorum queues / mirrored strategies where applicable)
  • performance tuning (memory watermarks, disk alarms, flow control, channel/connection behaviors)
  • upgrades and lifecycle management (zero/minimal downtime approaches, rollback planning)
  • 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.