Job Description

Job Summary

ROLE

BAND

TECH STACK

EXPERIENCE

TYPE

Mainframe Lead

E2.2

Mainframe

10+ Years

Full-time

Role Purpose

Lead the design, development and delivery of mainframe solutions, owning technical quality for the team: translating requirements into robust designs, guiding engineers day to day, and ensuring predictable, secure and maintainable delivery into production.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Design & Delivery

• Own detailed design for mainframe components, interfaces and enhancements within the agreed architecture.
• Break down requirements into technical tasks, estimates, sequencing and clear acceptance criteria.
• Deliver hands-on development for complex or high-risk components alongside the team.
• Ensure designs meet performance, security, reliability and maintainability expectations.

Team Leadership

• Guide a team of developers on design decisions, coding standards and technical approach.
• Run code reviews, design walkthroughs, defect triage and technical knowledge sharing.
• Mentor engineers, support onboarding and build depth across the mainframe skill set.

Quality & Operations

• Define and enforce unit, integration and regression testing expectations for the team.
• Own build, release and deployment readiness including rollback and verification steps.
• Drive defect prevention, root-cause analysis and permanent fixes over workarounds.

Collaboration & Governance

• Work with architects, business analysts, QA, DevOps and support teams across the delivery lifecycle.
• Participate in agile ceremonies, planning, estimation and dependency management.
• Maintain technical documentation, standards and reusable assets for the team.

Key Responsibilities

Technology Focus — Mainframe

• Design, develop and support COBOL/CICS/DB2 batch and online components within agreed standards.
• Optimize batch windows, DB2 access paths and resource consumption to protect service levels.
• Support mainframe modernization, API exposure and integration with distributed and cloud platforms.

Required Technical Competencies

Core Skills

COBOL, JCL, CICS, VSAM, DB2 and z/OS utilities; batch and online program design and optimization.

Design & Architecture

Mainframe application architecture, modularization, API enablement and modernization/coexistence patterns.

Data & Integration

DB2 and VSAM data design, SQL tuning, file handling, data conversion, integrity and reconciliation.

Platform & DevOps

z/OS operations, scheduling, change management, environment promotion and mainframe-to-distributed integration.

Quality & Operations

Unit and regression testing, batch cycle validation, performance and MIPS optimization, defect RCA.

Experience & Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering with strong mainframe expertise.
• Demonstrated experience leading small to mid-sized technical teams through full delivery cycles.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or IT, or equivalent experience.
• Relevant platform or cloud certifications advantageous, not mandatory.

Leadership & Behavioural

• Ownership and accountability for team technical outcomes.
• Practical problem solving with a bias for clean, sustainable solutions.
• Clear communication with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Coaching mindset and collaborative working style.

Location-Specific Expectations

• Collaborate from an India delivery location with stakeholders across regions and time zones.
• Ensure standards, decisions and reusable patterns are documented and adopted across distributed squads.
• Support virtual workshops, technical governance and production-readiness reviews.

Key Deliverables & Success Measures

• Detailed designs, estimates and technical plans agreed with architecture and delivery leads.
• High-quality, reviewed and tested code delivered to agreed timelines.
• Stable releases with low defect leakage and effective production handover.
• Improved team capability, engineering consistency and reusable assets.
• Timely escalation and resolution of technical risks and blockers.

Skill Requirements

Other Requirements