Sr. Manager, Infrastructure Enablement - Middleware, Messaging and Workload Automation

About the Role

The Sr. Manager - Infrastructure Enablement is accountable for the overall health, reliability and evolution of Gap’s enterprise data integration and middleware platforms across a complex hybrid-cloud environment.

This role serves as the Gap-side service owner for middleware, messaging and workload automation platforms, ensuring that services operated by our managed services partner consistently meet business, availability, performance and resilience expectations. While day-to-day execution and runbook operations are delivered by our managed services partner, this role owns outcomes, standards, prioritization and escalation for the platform portfolio.

The successful candidate will bring strong technical depth, operational rigor and leadership through influence to stabilize and modernize mission-critical integration services that support commerce, supply chain, stores and analytics.
What You'll Do

Service Ownership and Accountability

• Own end-to-end service health, availability and reliability outcomes for enterprise middleware, messaging and workload automation platforms, including real-time, batch and event-driven integrations.

• Act as the primary Gap escalation and decision authority for middleware and integration services delivered by our managed services partner.

• Ensure platforms meet defined SLAs, SLOs and peak-readiness requirements, including seasonal and business-critical events.

Platform Scope and Enablement

• Provide service ownership across enterprise integration technologies, including:

• Real-time messaging and streaming platforms (e.g., Confluent (Kafka), IBM MQ)

• Batch scheduling and workload automation (e.g., Broadcom dSeries Workload Automation or equivalent)

• Middleware and integration frameworks supporting application and partner connectivity

• Ensure reliable, secure and scalable data movement across on-premises, cloud and external partner ecosystems.

Vendor and Delivery Oversight

• Govern managed services delivery by:

• Setting service expectations and standards

• Reviewing operational performance, incidents and trends

• Driving accountability for remediation, root cause elimination and continuous improvement

• Partner with managed services leadership to balance demand, capacity, risk and technical debt while protecting Gap’s business priorities.

Operational Excellence and Resilience

• Drive improvements in observability, monitoring, alerting and error handling to reduce incidents and mean time to recovery.

• Ensure integration platforms are designed and operated with resilience, recoverability and security as first-order concerns.

• Participate in incident, problem and post-incident reviews for integration-related events, ensuring clear ownership and corrective actions.

Modernization and Strategy

• Lead platform modernization efforts, including:

• Cloud-native integration patterns

• Event-driven architectures

• Automation and standardization

• Platform rationalization where appropriate

• Contribute to multi-year infrastructure and integration roadmaps aligned to business and product strategy.

Collaboration and Governance

• Partner closely with application engineering, data engineering, SRE, infrastructure, security and architecture teams to enable reliable integration capabilities.

• Ensure compliance with internal and external standards (e.g., PCI, SOX, data protection requirements).

• Contribute to governance forums, capacity planning and strategic initiatives related to integration and middleware services.

Role Scope and Operating Model

• This role operates within a managed services model, where day-to-day platform operations and Level 1-Level 3 support are delivered by a strategic service partner.

• The Sr. Manager provides service ownership, governance, prioritization and escalation leadership, rather than performing hands-on platform administration.

• Accountability is focused on service health, reliability and outcomes, with execution carried out through established operational runbooks and delivery teams.

Who You Are

Required

• Proven experience owning or leading enterprise-scale middleware, messaging or integration platforms in a hybrid-cloud environment.

• Strong understanding of real-time, batch and event-driven integration patterns and architectures.

• Demonstrated success operating in a managed services or vendor-led delivery model, with clear ownership of outcomes.

• Ability to lead through influence in a highly matrixed, global organization.

• Experience partnering with third-party service providers and holding them accountable to defined service expectations.

• Strong operational mindset with experience in availability, resilience, incident management and continuous improvement.

• Excellent communication, collaboration and problem-solving skills.

Preferred

• Experience with Confluent, IBM MQ, enterprise schedulers (e.g., Broadcom dSeries Workload Automation) or similar middleware platforms.

• Exposure to cloud-native integration services and streaming platforms.

• Familiarity with observability, automation and SRE-aligned practices.

• Cloud certifications or relevant platform certifications (Azure, GCP, OCI or middleware technologies).