Mainframe Production Support

Position

Description:

This role is for a highly skilled Production Support Engineer with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) expertise, responsible for ensuring the availability, stability, performance, and resiliency of mission‑critical mainframe-based payment systems. The engineer will provide deep production support, proactive monitoring, incident management, and reliability improvements for high-volume, low-latency payment platforms.

The ideal candidate brings strong mainframe production support experience, solid payments and banking domain knowledge, and a mindset aligned with SRE principles, including automation, monitoring, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

This role is hybrid and requires you to be at office at a minimum 4 days per week - subject to change at any time.

Your future duties and responsibilities:

• Production Support & Reliability
 Own 24x7 production support for mainframe-based payment applications, ensuring high availability and minimal downtime.
 Monitor system health, performance, and capacity using enterprise monitoring tools; proactively identify and mitigate risks.
 Act as an L2/L3 support engineer for critical incidents, performing root cause analysis (RCA) and driving permanent fixes.
 Lead and support incident response, major incident management, and post‑incident reviews, ensuring lessons are documented and applied.

• SRE & Operational Excellence
 Apply SRE principles to define and monitor SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for payment systems.
 Improve system reliability by reducing manual interventions through automation, scripting, and operational best practices.
 Continuously optimize system performance, batch throughput, and transaction processing times on mainframe platforms.
 Partner with development teams to shift‑left reliability concerns and improve operability before production releases.

• Mainframe Operations & Payments Processing
 Support and maintain mainframe environments (z/OS) handling high-volume payment transactions.
 Monitor and support batch and online workloads, including CICS, IMS, DB2, MQ, and JCL-based processing.
 Ensure end‑to‑end processing integrity for payment flows, including settlement, reconciliation, and exception handling.
 Coordinate with infrastructure, network, and middleware teams during outages or system changes.

• Change, Release & Compliance
 Support production releases, system upgrades, and configuration changes with minimal risk to live payment processing.
 Ensure compliance with audit, security, and regulatory requirements inherent to banking and payments platforms.
 Maintain accurate runbooks, operational procedures, and knowledge base documentation.

Required qualifications to be successful in this role:

• Mainframe & Production Support
 Strong hands-on experience in Mainframe Production Support (z/OS environment).
 Working knowledge of CICS, DB2, IMS, MQ, and batch processing (JCL).

 Experience with performance tuning, abend analysis, dump analysis, and job optimization.

• Monitoring, Reliability & Automation

 Experience with enterprise monitoring and alerting tools for mainframe systems (e.g., OMEGAMON or equivalent).
 Strong understanding of SRE concepts such as SLIs, SLOs, MTTR, error budgets, and reliability metrics.
 Experience in scripting or automation (REXX, shell, Python, or equivalent) to reduce manual operational effort.

• Data & Analysis
 Proficiency in SQL for querying DB2 and analyzing production data issues.
 Ability to analyze system metrics, logs, and transaction traces to identify bottlenecks and failures.

• Cloud & Modern Tooling (Good to Have)
 Basic understanding of cloud concepts (Azure preferred) and hybrid architectures connecting mainframe with distributed systems.
 Exposure to Generative AI / Copilot tools for operational efficiency, incident analysis, or knowledge management is a plus.

• Required Domain Knowledge
 Strong understanding of payments processing and payment rails such as SWIFT, ACH, Fedwire, RTGS, or equivalent.
 Solid banking domain knowledge, including transaction lifecycle, settlements, reconciliations, and regulatory constraints.
 Experience supporting mission-critical,…