Position: Mainframe Support Engineer
Location: Edison, NJ (Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite)
Senior Mainframe Support Engineer / Technical Lead with strong expertise in COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, VSAM, and Mainframe Production Support. The ideal candidate should have extensive experience supporting large-scale enterprise applications within the Life Insurance domain, handling production incidents, performance optimization, application enhancements, and modernization initiatives.
This role requires excellent troubleshooting skills, leadership capabilities, and hands-on experience maintaining business-critical applications running on IBM Mainframe.
Required Experience
10+ years of Mainframe Development & Production Support experience
Strong experience in Life Insurance domain (Mandatory)
Excellent knowledge of COBOL, DB2, CICS, JCL and VSAM
Experience supporting mission-critical production applications
Experience working in Agile environments
Experience working directly with business users and offshore teams
Strong communication skills
Primary Responsibilities
Mainframe Development
Design, develop and enhance enterprise Mainframe applications.
Develop high-quality COBOL programs following coding standards.
Create and optimize JCLs for batch processing.
Develop and optimize DB2 SQL queries.
Develop and support CICS online applications.
Work with VSAM datasets and file processing.
Production Support
Provide L2/L3 Production Support for critical applications.
Perform root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents.
Resolve batch failures and application issues within SLA.
Support weekend implementations and production releases when required.
Coordinate with Infrastructure, DBA, Middleware and Operations teams.
Monitor batch processing and overnight jobs.
Performance Optimization
Optimize COBOL applications.
Improve DB2 query performance.
Tune batch jobs for reduced execution time.
Optimize CICS transactions and response time.
Improve overall application performance and stability.
Release & Change Management
Manage application deployments across environments.
Support code migration and release activities.
Follow change management and audit processes.
Ensure compliance with security standards.
Prepare implementation and rollback plans.
Technical Leadership
Lead design discussions and technical solutioning.
Review code and mentor junior developers.
Participate in architecture reviews.
Drive best coding practices.
Estimate development efforts.
Modernization
Exposure to modern Mainframe initiatives including:
API Enablement
REST API Integration
Mainframe Modernization
DevOps Pipeline Integration
CI/CD
Git
Jenkins
IBM Z modernization initiatives
Documentation
Prepare Technical Design Documents
Functional Specifications
RCA Documents
Runbooks
Support Documents
Knowledge Transfer Documentation
Mandatory Technical Skills
COBOL
JCL
DB2
CICS
VSAM
SQL
IBM Mainframe
TSO/ISPF
SDSF
Endevor or Changeman
Control-M / CA7 Scheduler
Abend-AID
Xpediter
File-AID
Preferred Skills
MQ Series
IBM Utilities
EZtrieve
Syncsort
IDCAMS
REXX
Easytrieve
REST API Integration
DevOps
Git
Jenkins
Domain Experience (Mandatory)
Candidates must have recent experience in the Life Insurance industry, preferably working on:
Policy Administration
Claims Processing
Underwriting
Billing & Premium Processing
Member/Customer Management
Policy Servicing
