Job Description & Details
This is a hands-on mainframe engineering role based in Jersey City where you will be knee-deep in legacy modernization, impact analysis, and core transactional systems. If you know your way around COBOL copybooks and can write optimized DB2 queries without breaking a sweat, you'll fit right in here.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll spend your days modifying existing COBOL programs to handle shifting business logic, writing new routines to validate incoming data, and building out new VSAM files and DB2 tables. Expect to spend a significant chunk of time doing thorough impact analysis and documenting your findings before a single line of code touches Changeman version control. You will be working within an Agile team, which means balancing legacy development velocity with standard sprint planning and cross-functional troubleshooting.
The Core Tech Stack
Your bread and butter here needs to be solid COBOL, DB2, and VSAM, backed by hands-on experience with IMS and CICS. The team relies heavily on Changeman for version control, so you can't fake your way past deployment pipelines. They also need someone who understands relational database design inside a mainframe environment, specifically creating new tables and retrieving data efficiently without tanking system performance.
Interview Expectations
Expect the technical interviewers to hand you a broken COBOL program with a tricky pointer or performance bottleneck and ask you to debug it live while explaining your thought process. They will also likely drill down into your DB2 optimization strategies—be prepared to explain how you handle locking issues and how you analyze EXPLAIN plans for complex queries. The hiring manager is testing your depth of knowledge; they want to see if you instinctively understand memory management and sequential file handling.
Application Advice
When updating your resume for this role, don't just list COBOL and DB2 as bullet points; highlight specific projects where you designed VSAM files from scratch or managed complex releases using Changeman. Make sure keywords like 'impact analysis', 'IMS', 'CICS', and 'Agile mainframe' are front and center so you easily clear the initial ATS filter and get straight to the technical leads.