Senior Managed File Transfer (MFT) Administration & Automation Engineer

This is a heavy-duty infrastructure and automation role focused entirely on enterprise Managed File Transfer systems. If you know your way around Axway SecureTransport and IBM Sterling Connect:Direct inside and out, this long-term gig in Detroit offers a chance to stabilize and automate critical data pipelines. It's not a greenfield software dev role; it's about keeping mission-critical data moving securely between on-prem and AWS environments without dropping a packet.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

Expect to spend a good chunk of your day administering Axway SecureTransport clusters, keeping high-availability configurations tight, and troubleshooting thorny connectivity issues across SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS, and AS2 protocols. You won't just be clicking around a GUI; you'll be writing scripts to automate site provisioning, user and key management, and certificate lifecycles via REST and SOAP APIs. When load balancers act up or DNS cutovers go sideways, you'll be the one diving into the network traces to figure out why a transfer failed between upstream and downstream partners.

The Core Tech Stack

Your absolute bread and butter here will be Axway SecureTransport and IBM Sterling Connect:Direct, paired with deep networking knowledge like TCP passthrough versus SSL-offload load balancing. Since automation is a massive part of this job, you need strong Python or Shell scripting chops, familiarity with Ansible for config management, and the ability to interact with REST APIs. Add in some AWS experience (NLB/ALB, EFS) and DNS troubleshooting, and you've got the exact toolkit this infrastructure needs to stay resilient.

Interview Expectations

Be ready for the hiring manager to throw a complex TLS/SSL certificate chain failure scenario at you, asking how you would debug a silent handshake drop between an external partner and an internal Axway edge node. They want to see your systematic troubleshooting methodology, not just guessed keywords. They'll also likely grill you on how you handle zero-downtime certificate rotations in a high-availability active-active cluster without breaking active file transfers, probing your real-world operational experience.

Application Advice

Your resume needs to scream MFT reliability and automation. Make sure keywords like Axway SecureTransport, IBM Sterling Connect:Direct, REST API automation, and SSL certificate lifecycle management are front and center. Don't just list technologies; highlight specific metrics or scale, such as the number of nodes managed or the volume of daily file transfers secured, to easily bypass the ATS and prove you can handle enterprise-grade infrastructure.