Principal, Mainframe and Capacity

Job Description Principal Engineer, Mainframe CICS/MQ/WAS Performance and Capacity

Note:

Fidelity will not provide immigration sponsorship for this position.

The Fidelity Mainframe Capacity and Performance team is responsible for capacity modeling, forecasting, performance analysis, system configuration tuning, monitoring, and L2/L3 problem determination supporting Fidelity’s large complex IBM z Systems infrastructure. The team supports critical online and batch applications and works closely with business partners, Mainframe Hosting, CICS, MQ, WAS, DB2, Storage, Network, application teams, IBM, and other strategic vendors.

This Grade 6 role is focused on hands-on performance analysis, problem determination, monitoring, reporting, and automation across CICS, MQ, Web Sphere Application Server (WAS), Liberty Java Batch, Compute Grid, Kafka MQ connectors, and Operational Decision Manager (ODM). The associate will apply working knowledge of how applications use these middleware platforms to identify bottlenecks, explain workload behavior, support tuning, and improve operational readiness.

The Associate will perform detailed capacity and performance engineering for mainframe middleware services. The role requires a practical understanding of CICS internal functions and application usage; MQ queue managers, CHINIT address spaces, queues, channels, and off-mainframe conversation partners; and WAS/Compute Grid components supporting online and batch workloads.

The Associate will gather and analyze metrics from SMF/RMF, SYSVIEW, WAS PMI, Intelli Magic, SAS/MXG, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, PostgreSQL, Grafana, and Datadog. The role will create repeatable reports and dashboards, support incident and change analysis, assist with stress-test and modernization measurement, and contribute to automation that reduces manual effort.

This is a hands-on individual-contributor role. The Principal works under the direction of senior technical leaders while independently owning defined analyses, reports, dashboards, scripts, operational improvements, and problem investigations. The role is expected to document findings clearly, collaborate across teams, and build deeper expertise over time.

• Analyze CICS performance and behavior, including internal functions, region activity, transactions, programs, files, queues, dispatching, thresholds, and how application programs use CICS services.
• Analyze IBM MQ behavior across queue managers, CHINIT address spaces, queues, channels, and connections to distributed or off-mainframe conversation partners; identify tuning and problem-determination opportunities.
• Support WAS on z/OS, Liberty, Java Batch (JSR 352), and Compute Grid workloads, including PJM, Top Jobs/Sub Jobs, online and batch activity, and WAS PMI metric collection and interpretation.
• Support performance analysis of Kafka MQ connectors, brokers, channels, message flow, and tunable settings on the MQ and Kafka sides.
• Support ODM mainframe components by understanding business-rule invocation from WAS, CICS, and batch, and identifying what can be monitored and tuned.
• Apply working knowledge of z/OS components used by middleware platforms, including Coupling Facility services, real memory, zFS file systems, log streams, GP engines, and zIIP engines.
• Create and run SAS programs for performance reporting and use MXG fields associated with CICS, MQ, WAS, z/OS, and other IBM product areas.
• Create REXX programs and scripts to gather performance metrics not available through standard SMF reporting.
• Develop and maintain Grafana dashboards and support metric collection using Python and Prometheus with Victoria Metrics or PostgreSQL data stores and Datadog…