Job Description & Details
The posting is a bare‑bones call for a Mainframe Developer to work onsite in Phoenix. No fluff about perks or culture—just a need for someone who can keep legacy systems humming.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You’ll spend most of your day in a COBOL‑heavy environment, maintaining and enhancing batch jobs, troubleshooting JCL failures, and supporting production runs. Expect tight SLA pressure when a nightly run blows up, and you’ll be the go‑to person for root‑cause analysis and quick fixes. Collaboration will be with a small ops team that still relies on green‑screen interfaces, so clear communication about changes is key.
The Core Tech Stack
The role revolves around COBOL, JCL, and mainframe DB2/IMS back‑ends. You’ll also need a working knowledge of CICS or IMS transaction processing because the applications you touch are likely tied into those middleware layers. The company wants someone who can read and modify legacy code without breaking downstream processes, so deep debugging skills in a TSO/ISPF environment are non‑negotiable.
Interview Expectations
- “Walk me through how you would diagnose a failing batch job that exits with a S0C7 dump.” – They’re looking for your step‑by‑step approach: dump analysis, ABEND code interpretation, checking data set integrity, and using tools like IKJEFT01 or FDREPORT.
- “Explain the difference between VSAM KSDS and ESDS and when you’d choose one over the other.” – This tests whether you understand storage organization and performance trade‑offs, a must for any mainframe performance tuning.
Application Advice
Tailor your resume to surface the exact buzzwords the JD hints at: COBOL, JCL, CICS/IMS, DB2, VSAM, TSO/ISPF, and batch processing. Highlight any production support incidents you resolved under pressure, and quantify the impact (e.g., “Reduced nightly job failures by 30%”). Use the phrase “onsite Phoenix” to show you’re aware of the location requirement and can work on‑site.