Mainframe Production Support Engineer (Software Designer)
$95,000–$125,000 year
On-siteMalvern, Pennsylvania, United States
Job Summary
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, root cause analysis, and timely issue resolution for COBOL programs, DB2 processes, and job scheduling failures. Perform job restarts, reruns, and recovery activities while collaborating with development, database, and infrastructure teams to restore service. Create and maintain production runbooks, known-error documentation, and escalation procedures. Support on-call and off-hours activities for critical incidents and high-volume processing periods like month-end and year-end cycles. Participate in change-management and production-readiness activities for application and batch-processing changes.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of hands-on mainframe production support experience
- Strong experience with COBOL
- Strong experience with DB2
- Strong experience with JCL
- Strong experience with 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
- 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
Desired 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
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