Position: Principal Software Engineer – IBM i (AS/400) Connectivity
Location: Remote, United States
Level: Open from Software Engineer through Principal
Type: Direct hire (full time)
Overview
Our client, an enterprise workload automation software company, is building a new connectivity agent that extends its automation platform natively onto IBM i (AS/400). This role joins a small, senior team building the capability largely from first principles, validating on live IBM i partitions and making architectural decisions where documentation is limited.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, test and maintain native software for IBM i connectivity and integration
- Build native job submission/monitoring, spool file and message/data queue handling, and CL/RPG program invocation
- Integrate IBM i with the platform via native host server APIs and/or IBM Toolbox for Java (JTOpen/jt400)
- Implement security and per-user authorization using IBM i user profiles and authorities, extending existing identity/credential management
- Troubleshoot complex system-level issues across IBM i, Unix and Java
- Improve reliability, performance, security and scalability of the IBM i solution
- Participate in architecture, design reviews, code reviews, testing and release planning
- Use AI tools to accelerate development while verifying against authoritative IBM i references
- Document connector behavior and platform prerequisites for field and support teams
Required
- 10+ years professional software engineering with strong Java 8+
- Hands-on IBM i integration: CL, native job/spool/queue APIs, JTOpen/jt400, DB2 for i
- Working proficiency in C, including ILE C on IBM i
- Vendor host-server or RPC-style APIs over TCP/IP (connection lifecycle, error handling)
- Strong concurrency/multithreading; long-running monitors (job polling, spool/file event detection)
- Works from primary IBM i API references, not just tutorials or AI output
- Git, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes
- Production use of AI tools, with judgment to catch incorrect AI output on specialized IBM i APIs
- Architectural focus across APIs and connectors
Preferred
- Workload automation tools such as Tidal, CA-7, Control-M, Stonebranch or BMC
- IBM i clustering / high availability
- Advanced IBM i security (authorization lists, adopted authority)
- RPG/COBOL environments or IBM i modernization
- Mainframe or midrange migration projects