Mainframe Tech Lead /Solution Architect

Description

The engagement supports a maintenance assessment and advisory for a legacy mainframe environment built primarily on COBOL, running mission-critical batch and online workloads. The objective is to establish a fact-based understanding of the current application estate and its support model, and to define a scoped, low risk maintenance pilot as the basis for a potential longer term managed services engagement. 

The initial advisory phase is an assessment structured in three stages: a scope-alignment workshop to agree services, ownership, and boundaries; a current-state assessment of the code estate, data, batch/online flows, operations, and ticket history to establish baselines and pain points; and a pilot-identification stage to prioritize candidate use cases and define objectives and success metrics. The phase is diagnostic in nature — it covers evaluation, characterization, and effort estimation only, with no code remediation or production changes performed during assessment. Success depends heavily on timely access to client subject-matter experts and to the target environment.

Requirements

• Deep mainframe experience on COBOL-based estates.
• Hands-on experience with Hitachi VOS-family mainframes and the XDM/DCCM3 and XDM/RD stack (or demonstrable deep equivalence from IBM CICS/IMS-DC and DB2, with willingness to ramp on the Hitachi dialect)
• Proven ability to characterize a multi-million-LOC estate across online, batch, data, and integration tiers and translate it into complexity and criticality assessments.
• Experience defining maintenance or support operating models (roles, SLAs, runbooks, escalation) for legacy systems.
• Able to critically validate AI-generated analysis against source code and SME input before it informs decisions.
• Able to lead technical discovery and deep-dives directly with client subject-matter experts.
• Strong stakeholder-facing communication, including presenting findings and recommendations to senior audiences.

Job responsibilities

• Own the technical discovery and characterization of the legacy mainframe COBOL estate.
• Produce complexity, criticality, and maintainability assessments of applications, batch flows, and integrations.
• Map application, data, and batch dependencies to identify risks and single points of failure.
• Oversee AI-assisted analysis and validate machine-generated findings against source and SME input before use.
• Define the proposed target maintenance operating model and support approach.
• Scope and prioritize candidate use cases for a subsequent maintenance pilot.
• Direct the work of the team and consolidate outputs into architectural findings.
• Present assessment outcomes, risks, and recommendations to client and internal stakeholders.