Middleware Strategy Owner

About the position Wells Fargo is seeking a Middleware (Messaging Platforms) Strategy Owner accountable for the enterprise strategy, roadmap, governance, and adoption of messaging and event streaming capabilities across the organization. This role aligns business and technology stakeholders to ensure messaging platforms are secure, reliable, scalable, cost-effective, and developer-friendly, supporting integration patterns such as event-driven architecture, asynchronous messaging, pub/sub, and streaming. The Strategy Owner partners closely with architecture, infrastructure/platform engineering, cybersecurity, application teams, SRE/operations, and vendor partners to define standards, drive modernization, and enable consistent delivery of messaging solutions. In this role, you will perform the following functions: Define and maintain the enterprise middleware strategy (queueing, pub/sub, streaming, caching, App/Web), including target-state architecture and technology direction. Own the multi-year roadmap for messaging platforms, balancing reliability, feature enablement, modernization, regulatory requirements, and cost optimization. Act as the product owner for middleware: define platform vision, value proposition, service catalog, and measurable outcomes. Create and maintain developer enablement assets: onboarding guides, templates, sample code, golden paths, and internal documentation. Drive adoption via training, office hours, community of practice, and clear communications Partner with Enterprise/Domain Architects to define integration patterns and ensure alignment with broader middleware strategy. Drive observability standards: logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks. Lead continuous improvement initiatives post-incidents (RCA themes, corrective actions, reliability investment). Partner with Security to ensure compliance with policies and regulations (e.g., encryption in transit/at rest, secrets management). Own platform cost model and implement FinOps practices (showback/chargeback as applicable). Manage vendor relationships and contracts; evaluate tooling and platform options (managed services vs self-managed). Serve as the single point of accountability for middleware direction and decisions. Communicate roadmap progress, policy changes, and operational status to senior leadership and stakeholders. Facilitate cross-team decision-making and resolve conflicts around platform usage, priorities, and standards.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the enterprise middleware strategy (queueing, pub/sub, streaming, caching, App/Web), including target-state architecture and technology direction.
• Own the multi-year roadmap for messaging platforms, balancing reliability, feature enablement, modernization, regulatory requirements, and cost optimization.
• Act as the product owner for middleware: define platform vision, value proposition, service catalog, and measurable outcomes.
• Create and maintain developer enablement assets: onboarding guides, templates, sample code, golden paths, and internal documentation.
• Drive adoption via training, office hours, community of practice, and clear communications
• Partner with Enterprise/Domain Architects to define integration patterns and ensure alignment with broader middleware strategy.
• Drive observability standards: logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerts, and runbooks.
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives post-incidents (RCA themes, corrective actions, reliability investment).
• Partner with Security to ensure compliance with policies and regulations (e.g., encryption in transit/at rest, secrets management).
• Own platform cost model and implement FinOps practices (showback/chargeback as applicable).
• Manage vendor relationships and contracts; evaluate tooling and platform options (managed services vs self-managed).
• Serve as the single point of accountability for middleware direction and decisions.
• Communicate roadmap progress, policy changes, and operational status to senior leadership and stakeholders.
• Facilitate cross-team decision-making and resolve conflicts around platform usage, priorities, and standards.

Requirements

• 7+ years of Business Systems Data and Business Systems Designing experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
• 7+ years in middleware/integration/platform engineering
• 3+ years in a strategic leadership, product owner, or architecture role

Nice-to-haves

• Experience operating messaging platforms at enterprise scale (high volume, multi-tenant, regulated environments)
• Strong financial acumen
• Familiarity with schema management and event standards (e.g., Avro/Protobuf/JSON schema, registry patterns)
• Hands-on knowledge of platform automation and IaC (e.g Ansible)
• Experience with container-based messaging deployments and/or managed cloud services
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent experience
• Strong experience with messaging and event streaming platforms, such as: Kafka / Confluent, IBM MQ, Solace
• Demonstrated knowledge of event-driven architecture, asynchronous integration patterns, and distributed systems
• Experience defining standards/governance, building roadmaps, and driving adoption across multiple teams
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering concepts (SLOs, incident management, capacity planning)
• Excellent communication skills: ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders

Benefits

• Health benefits
• 401(k) Plan
• Paid time off
• Disability benefits
• Life insurance, critical illness insurance, and accident insurance
• Parental leave
• Critical caregiving leave
• Discounts and savings
• Commuter benefits
• Tuition reimbursement
• Scholarships for dependent children
• Adoption reimbursement

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