Mainframe Production Support Engineer (Software Designer)

Location: Malvern, PA | Employment type: Full-time | Work Model: Onsite

About The Role

Globant is seeking an experienced Mainframe Production Support Engineer to support a client’s mainframe operations environment. This role will focus on maintaining, monitoring, troubleshooting, and supporting critical batch-processing operations and existing mainframe applications. The ideal candidate has deep hands-on experience with COBOL, DB2, JCL, z/OS batch operations, job scheduling, and production incident resolution. This person will play a key role in ensuring daily, nightly, month-end, quarter-end, and year-end batch cycles complete successfully within defined service-level agreements.

Responsibilities

• Execute, monitor, and troubleshoot daily and nightly mainframe batch jobs using JCL, ensuring completion within established SLA windows.
• Provide production support for mainframe applications, including incident triage, impact assessment, root cause analysis, and timely issue resolution.
• Maintain and enhance existing COBOL programs to resolve production defects, support small enhancements, and meet ongoing business requirements.
• Monitor DB2-related batch processes, investigate data issues, and support database-related job execution and recovery activities.
• Perform job scheduling, restart, rerun, recovery, and dependency management for failed or delayed batch jobs.
• Work with enterprise job scheduling tools such as Control-M, CA7, Zeke, or similar platforms.
• Investigate batch abends, job failures, performance issues, data discrepancies, file-processing issues, and application failures.
• Coordinate with application development, database administration, infrastructure, scheduling, and business operations teams to restore service and resolve production issues.
• Identify recurring production issues, perform root cause analysis, and recommend permanent corrective actions to improve platform stability.
• Support on-call and off-hours production activities, as needed, for critical incidents and batch-processing cycles.
• Provide enhanced support and monitoring for month-end, quarter-end, year-end, and other high-volume processing periods.
• Create and maintain production runbooks, job schedules, escalation procedures, known-error documentation, and issue-resolution guides.
• Participate in change-management, release-management, and production-readiness activities for application and batch-processing changes.
• Ensure all production changes, incident actions, job reruns, and recovery activities are documented in accordance with client procedures.
• Collaborate with teams supporting hybrid mainframe and modernized applications, including Java-based integrations where applicable.

Requirements

• 8+ years of hands-on mainframe production support experience.
• Strong experience with:
  • COBOL.
  • DB2.
  • JCL.
  • z/OS batch processing environments.
• Demonstrated experience executing, monitoring, troubleshooting, restarting, and recovering mainframe batch jobs.
• Strong understanding of job dependencies, batch cycles, file processing, job scheduling, and SLA-driven production operations.
• Experience with one or more enterprise scheduling tools, such as Control-M, CA7, Zeke, or equivalent.
• Experience with incident management, production troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and permanent corrective-action planning.
• Ability to diagnose and resolve COBOL application issues, DB2 data issues, JCL errors, batch abends, and job-performance concerns.
• Experience supporting critical processing windows, including overnight, weekend, month-end, quarter-end, or year-end batch cycles.
• Strong documentation skills, including production runbooks, troubleshooting procedures, job recovery steps, and known-issue records.
• Experience collaborating with application-development, database, infrastructure, operations, and business teams.
• Ability to work calmly and effectively under pressure during high-priority production incidents.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working knowledge of Java, especially in hybrid environments integrating mainframe applications with modern services or platforms.
• Experience with ServiceNow or comparable ITSM tools for incident, problem, change, and request management.
• Familiarity with ITIL processes and production-support best practices.
• Experience supporting mainframe modernization, migration, API integration, or hybrid cloud initiatives.
• Knowledge of batch-monitoring, alerting, or performance-monitoring tools.
• Experience with DB2 utilities, production data validation, and data-reconciliation processes.
• Experience working in financial services, insurance, healthcare, or another high-volume, regulated enterprise environment.

Pay

Salary Range: $95,000–$125,000 annually

Ideal Candidate Profile

• Operations-focused mainframe professional who takes ownership of production stability and timely batch completion.
• Strong troubleshooter who can distinguish between JCL, COBOL, DB2, scheduling, infrastructure, and upstream/downstream dependency issues.
• Comfortable providing on-call support and working critical processing windows when needed.
• Detail-oriented, process-driven, and disciplined about documentation, change controls, escalation, and operational handoffs.
• Collaborative communicator who can provide clear updates to technical teams and business stakeholders during production incidents.