Mainframe Technical Specialist

About the role

We are seeking an experienced Mainframe Technical Specialist to design, develop, maintain, troubleshoot, and support mission-critical mainframe applications and systems. The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience with IBM z/OS, COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, VSAM, and enterprise batch processing environments. The Mainframe Technical Specialist will work closely with application development, infrastructure, database, production support, and business teams to ensure high availability, reliability, performance, and stability of mainframe applications. The successful candidate should be comfortable working on complex technical issues, analyzing production problems, participating in application enhancements, and providing technical leadership to development and support teams.

In this role, you will be responsible for maintaining and enhancing critical enterprise mainframe applications while ensuring system reliability and performance. You will work across development, production support, database, infrastructure, QA, and business teams to deliver stable and scalable solutions. The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical professional who can independently troubleshoot complex mainframe issues, develop high-quality solutions, and provide technical leadership when required.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, enhance, and maintain enterprise mainframe applications.
• Analyze business and technical requirements and translate them into scalable mainframe solutions.
• Develop and maintain COBOL programs, JCL, DB2 queries, CICS transactions, and VSAM files.
• Perform application troubleshooting, debugging, root-cause analysis, and production support.
• Analyze system and application failures and implement permanent corrective solutions.
• Develop and optimize batch processing jobs and production workflows.
• Monitor batch jobs, resolve job failures, and ensure successful completion of critical processing.
• Work with production support teams to resolve high-priority incidents and service-impacting issues.
• Participate in application modernization and mainframe transformation initiatives.
• Perform code reviews and ensure development standards and best practices are followed.
• Analyze application performance and identify opportunities for optimization.
• Develop technical specifications, design documents, and implementation plans.
• Perform unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, and production validation.
• Coordinate with QA teams to resolve defects and support testing activities.
• Work with DBAs on DB2 performance, SQL optimization, database design, and data-related issues.
• Work with system administrators and infrastructure teams on z/OS-related issues.
• Participate in production deployments, release management, and change-management activities.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to junior developers.
• Participate in on-call or after-hours production support when required.
• Maintain technical documentation, application diagrams, support procedures, and knowledge articles.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security, audit, and change-control requirements.

Required Technical Skills

• Mainframe Technologies: IBM z/OS, COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, VS