Lead PL/I Architect – Mainframe Design & Tuning

ALOIS UK; Australia; On-site; AUD 165,000 - 248,000; Full time

Job summary

ALOIS Australia seeks a highly experienced PL/I Design and Development Consultant to provide technical leadership to an embedded mainframe team working on PL/I-based applications. You will lead complex analysis, design, and hands-on development while reducing risk in large, legacy systems.

You will guide the team through high-stakes changes, ensure performance and reliability, and transfer knowledge to strengthen PL/I capabilities across the project.

Qualifications

• Extensive commercial experience designing and developing enterprise PL/I applications on IBM mainframes.
• A career depth typically associated with 20+ years of relevant mainframe experience, preferably within banking, insurance or regulated environments.
• Demonstrated experience delivering significant PL/I development, migration, remediation or modernization initiatives.
• Substantial hands-on involvement across solution design, detailed technical design, build, testing, implementation, troubleshooting and tuning.
• Deep technical knowledge of VSAM, including complex file structures, access patterns, performance, concurrency, integrity and recoverability.
• Deep practical knowledge of IBM MQ, including application integration, message processing, exception handling, diagnostics and performance.
• Demonstrated ability to understand and safely modify large, complex and potentially poorly documented legacy applications.
• Strong diagnostic and problem-solving capability across online, batch, data-access and integration processing.
• Experience providing hands-on technical leadership, design assurance and code review within an established development team.
• Ability to work effectively with experienced developers without duplicating responsibilities or operating purely as an adviser.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the production of clear technical designs and implementation guidance.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical analysis and detailed design of complex PL/I application changes.
• Establish practical design and development approaches for the Phoenix solution.
• Undertake hands-on development of complex or high-risk PL/I components.
• Analyse large and complex existing PL/I codebases, including online, batch and integration processing.
• Lead complex troubleshooting, root-cause analysis and performance-tuning activities.
• Review technical designs and code produced by the development team.
• Identify technical risks, design weaknesses and potential implementation issues.
• Work collaboratively with the development team to resolve complex engineering problems.
• Support technical estimation, development planning, testing, implementation and production-readiness activities.
• Provide technical leadership while strengthening the team’s PL/I capability through practical knowledge transfer.

Skills

PL/I design & development

Mainframe IBM

VSAM

IBM MQ

Troubleshooting & performance tuning

Technical leadership

Code review

Communication skills

Tools

Db2

CICS

Job description

ALOIS Australia seeks a highly experienced PL/I Design and Development Consultant to provide technical leadership to an embedded mainframe team working on PL/I-based applications. You will lead complex analysis, design, and hands-on development while reducing risk in large, legacy systems.

You will guide the team through high-stakes changes, ensure performance and reliability, and transfer knowledge to strengthen PL/I capabilities across the project.