Senior Mainframe Production Support Lead

Role: Senior Mainframe Production Support Lead

Work Location: McKinney, TX (Remote)

Type: Contract

POSITION OVERVIEW:

• The Senior Mainframe Production Support Lead is responsible for ensuring 24x7 stability, availability, and operational excellence of Life Insurance applications, running on a z/VSE mainframe platform.
• This role provides L2/L3 production support, leads incident triage and resolution, ensures SLA compliance, and supports critical batch and online insurance processes in a highly regulated, SLA driven environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Production Support & Operations
• Provide L2/L3 production support for AIL mainframe insurance applications.
• Monitor and ensure successful completion of daily, weekly, and monthly batch cycles.
• Support batch cycle execution, including job monitoring, restarts, reruns, and data corrections.
• Perform abend analysis, issue resolution, and production recovery activities.
• Ensure end to end data flow, coordinating with upstream and downstream systems to confirm timely receipt and processing of production files.

Incident, Problem & Change Management

• Perform incident triage, prioritization, and assignment for production issues.
• Conduct in depth incident analysis, troubleshooting, and resolution.
• Apply temporary or tactical fixes where required (without code changes) to restore service.
• Identify root causes and propose permanent fixes, coordinating with Application Build teams for code remediation.
• Manage incidents, problems, and changes using ServiceNow and Jira.
• Participate in change, release, and deployment activities, including post implementation validation and production readiness checks.

Technical Analysis & SME Support

• Analyze and resolve production issues involving:
• Assembler
• Easytrieve
• COBOL
• CICS
• JCL
• VSAM
• Act as an Application SME, supporting L2.5 and Production Assurance teams with deep application and data knowledge.
• Work closely with Application Build teams, Production Assurance, Infrastructure/System Programmers, vendors, and business stakeholders.

Documentation & Continuous Improvement

• Maintain and enhance runbooks, SOPs, operational procedures, and knowledge articles.
• Identify opportunities for operational improvements, standardization, and risk reduction.
• Support audit, compliance, and operational reporting requirements.

On Call & Production Coverage

• Participate in 24x7 on call rotation supporting P1/P2 production incidents.
• Provide after hours, weekend, and holiday support for critical batch processing and business events.
• Ensure rapid response, effective communication, and timely resolution during business critical outages.

SLA & ITIL Management

• Ensure adherence to SLA targets for incident response and resolution.
• Track and manage incident aging, backlog trends, repeat issues, and RCA action items.
• Apply ITIL best practices across Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management.
• Support SLA reporting, audits, and compliance activities.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 10+ years of experience providing L2/L3 mainframe production support for mission critical applications in a 24x7, SLA driven environment.
• Strong hands on experience supporting mainframe technologies, including:
• z/VSE and z/OS
• Assembler
• Easytrieve
• COBOL
• CICS
• JCL
• VSAM
• Proven expertise in batch operations support, including job monitoring, restarts, reruns, abend resolution, and data corrections.
• Experience using ITSM tools such as ServiceNow and Jira, with strong knowledge of ITIL based Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management processes.
• Life Insurance domain experience strongly preferred, particularly supporting Acquisition and Policy Administration systems.
• Demonstrated ability to perform deep technical troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and production recovery.
• Proven experience working under pressure during P1/P2 incidents, meeting strict SLA response and resolution targets.
• Strong communication and stakeholder coordination skills, including interaction with business users, vendors, infrastructure, and application teams.
• Strong ownership mindset with a focus on system stability, reliability, and business continuity.
• Demonstrated leadership capability to guide cross functional teams during high severity production incidents.