Senior PL/I Lead — Mainframe Design & Performance Expert

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

Job summary

ITbility in Australia/NZ is seeking a Lead PL/I Design and Development Consultant to provide technical leadership to an experienced COBOL-based team working on the PL/I-based ManTec application.

The consultant will lead complex PL/I initiatives, work hands-on with code, and ensure technical assurance and production readiness. This is not a routine maintenance role; expect deep design, analysis, and performance-tuning tasks.

Qualifications

• Extensive commercial experience designing and developing enterprise applications in PL/I on IBM mainframe platforms.
• A career depth typically associated with 20 or more years of relevant mainframe application experience, preferably within banking, insurance or a similarly complex regulated environment.
• Demonstrated experience delivering significant PL/I development, migration, remediation or modernisation initiatives.
• Substantial hands-on involvement across solution design, detailed technical design, build, testing, implementation, troubleshooting and tuning.
• Deep 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.
• 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.
• Experience with Db2 for evaluating solution options or comparing Db2 and VSAM data-access approaches.
• Experience with CICS and high-volume mainframe transaction-processing applications.
• Experience within banking, insurance or another highly regulated industry.
• Experience with complex financial calculations, batch processing, reconciliation and regulatory processing.
• Experience migrating or restructuring PL/I applications to remove a legacy database dependency.
• Familiarity with mainframe performance-monitoring, debugging and diagnostic toolsets.

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

Mainframe

Leadership

VSAM

IBM MQ

CICS

Db2

Performance tuning

Code review

Tools

DB2

VSAM

CICS

IBM MQ

Job description

ITbility in Australia/NZ is seeking a Lead PL/I Design and Development Consultant to provide technical leadership to an experienced COBOL-based team working on the PL/I-based ManTec application.

The consultant will lead complex PL/I initiatives, work hands-on with code, and ensure technical assurance and production readiness. This is not a routine maintenance role; expect deep design, analysis, and performance-tuning tasks.