IBM Scheduler Administrator​/Infrastructure Engineer - W2

Role

IBM Workload Scheduler Administrator / Infrastructure Engineer

Riverwoods, IL (3 days a week onsite) / Remote may be considered for an exceptional candidate

Contract (W2)

Monday - Friday 9:00 am - 5:00 pm Central, full time, with flexible hours for occasional weekend change control, rotating on-call with two other team members.

Senior Manager Software Engineering

We are seeking a highly skilled (3‑5+ years dedicated experience administering) IBM Workload Scheduler (IWS) Administrator to manage, maintain, and optimize our enterprise batch scheduling infrastructure. The successful candidate will be responsible for the end‑to‑end administration of the IWS environment hosted primarily on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This role requires a strong blend of IWS expertise, Linux system administration, and scripting to ensure high availability and seamless execution of critical business workloads.

• Administer Production IBM Workload Scheduler (aka Tivoli Workload Scheduler) environment with 28,000 unique daily jobs across ~350,000 daily job runs, 44 servers, and three other change control environments.
• Administer, install, configure, and patch/upgrade IWS components (Master Domain Manager, Dynamic Agents, Dynamic Pool, Dynamic Workload Console).
• Work with Product Owner on communicating work streams in Jira.
• Manage job promotions using Workload Application Template‑based processes, ensuring platform stability checks for each promotion.
• Manage change control across four separate environments, enforcing standards and policies.
• Maintain and promote 99.17% Production platform uptime per calendar month (excluding planned outages and maintenance windows) using SOPs, Dev Ops tools, and disciplined change control.
• Communicate platform improvements to a user community of ~500 developers and data engineers.
• Production consists of 44 servers across MDM, DWC, and dynamic agents.
• Resolve complex job failures, performance bottlenecks, agent issues, and infrastructure issues.
• Advise on complex job scheduling design questions for the scheduling support team.
• Monitor scheduler health, manage database maintenance, perform backup/disaster recovery, and conduct monthly failovers.
• Define and maintain security policies, user authorizations, and authentication for the DWC.
• Respond to cybersecurity vulnerability assessments and regulatory audit inquiries (including PCI).
• Design and implement Ansible automation and self‑healing mechanisms to reduce unplanned outages.
• Coordinate with offshore teams performing SOPs during non‑working hours.
• Script in Python using the IWS REST API.

• Strong experience with IBM Workload Scheduler architecture, especially Dynamic Workload Broker, V10.1+, high availability of MDMs managing Fault Tolerant Agent and Dynamic Agent architectures.
• Strong conceptual understanding of Master Domain Manager (MDM), Backup MDM (BMDM), Dynamic Workload Console (DWC), Fault Tolerant Agent (FTA), Dynamic Agent (DA).
• Strong grasp of conman CLI to monitor and control production plan, check job/job stream/resource status.
• Strong grasp of composer CLI to define, modify and extract scheduling objects.
• Strong grasp of planman CLI to control pre‑production plan and GUI mirroring.
• Strong grasp of the lifecycle of the daily production planning process, phases of JNextPlan/FINAL.
• Proficiency in navigating the DWC web‑based GUI to monitor workloads, manage user access security, and define scheduling objects.
• Experience installing IWS components, applying Fix Packs, and Interim Fixes.
• Troubleshooting with logs under TWSDATA/stdlist, adjusting trace level for netman, batchman, writer, mailman, etc.
• Strong experience with IBM Web Sphere Liberty.
• Strong grasp of reading messages.log, traces.log, FFDC logs.
• Strong grasp of configuring JVM heap sizes.
• Strong grasp of configuring tracing scope, tracing levels, tracing retention, and trace strings.
• Strong experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8+.
• Deep familiarity with bash/shell commands for text processing (grep, awk, sed), file manipulation, and system navigation.
• Ability to manage, start, stop, and…