Description
We are looking for an experienced CICS, MQ, and z/OS Systems Programmer on a permanent/contractor basis to support, enhance, and modernise our missioncritical IBM Z environments. This role is central to the stability, performance, and resilience of our core transactionprocessing platforms. You will work across installation, configuration, performance engineering, incident resolution, and continuous improvement, ensuring our systems remain secure, compliant, and highly available.
The ideal candidate brings deep technical expertise, strong problemsolving skills, and the ability to collaborate with crossfunctional teams in a fastmoving enterprise environment.
This is a remote role and you can be located anywhere in the world.
Key responsibilities:
- Install, upgrade, configure, and customise IBM CICS Transaction Server and IBM MQ across multiple z/OS environments.
- Design, implement, and maintain CICS intercommunication capabilities, including transaction routing, distributed program link (DPL), MRO, IPIC, and web enablement.
- Administer and optimise MQ queue managers, channels, queues, and associated security and recovery processes.
- Maintain and tune VSAM datasets, CICS exits, and supporting assembler routines.
- Conduct system testing including integration, regression, concurrency, and failover scenarios.
- Diagnose and resolve complex issues using IPCS, system traces, dumps, logs, and performance data.
- Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and deliver actionable recommendations to prevent recurrence.
- Lead or contribute to performance tuning, capacity planning, and workload optimisation initiatives.
- Support compliance, audit, and security requirements, including RACF and platform hardening.
- Produce clear technical documentation, operational procedures, and stakeholder reporting.
- Collaborate with application, infrastructure, and security teams to support change, release, and modernisation programmes.
Requirements
Key skills & experience:
- Solid handson experience with IBM CICS Transaction Server and IBM MQ in largescale z/OS environments.
- Strong understanding of CICS architecture, regions, RDO, CPSM/CICSPlex, and intercommunication facilities.
- Solid experience with MQ administration, including clustering, security, logging, and recovery.
- Good working knowledge of CTG (CICS Transaction Gateway) and its integration patterns.
- Strong z/OS systems programming background, including JCL, SMP/E, WLM, JES2, and subsystem integration.
- Proficiency with RACF and mainframe security concepts.
- Demonstrated capability in performance tuning, problem determination, and highseverity incident resolution.
- Experience supporting modernisation initiatives, such as APIs, REST enablement, Zowe, DevOps tooling, or hybridcloud integration.
- Ability to produce highquality documentation and communicate effectively with technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
Desirable skills (nice to have):
Experience with DB2, IMS, or MQ on distributed platforms.
Familiarity with automation tools (OPS/MVS, System Automation, ControlM, TWS).
Exposure to observability tooling, SMF analytics, or performance monitoring suites.
Knowledge of CICS web services, Liberty, or Java integration on z/OS.
Participation in oncall or 24/7 support environments.
