Mainframe Application Support / Mainframe SRE Lead

Job Title: Mainframe Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead

Location: Columbus, OH (Onsite)

Job Type: Contract

Role Summary

The Mainframe SRE Lead is responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, performance, and scalability of enterprise mainframe platforms. This role blends traditional mainframe engineering with modern SRE principles, focusing on automation, observability, incident management, and continuous improvement. The lead will guide a team of engineers while partnering closely with application, infrastructure, and operations teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the Mainframe SRE team, providing technical direction, mentoring, and performance guidance
• Own the reliability, availability, and resilience of mainframe environments (z/OS and related subsystems)
• Define and implement SRE practices such as SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, and reliability metrics
• Drive automation to reduce manual operations, improve recovery time, and enhance system stability
• Oversee monitoring, alerting, and observability for mainframe systems using modern and legacy tools
• Lead incident management, root cause analysis (RCA), and post-incident reviews
• Partner with application development teams to improve reliability, performance, and deployment practices
• Plan and execute capacity management, performance tuning, and workload optimization
• Ensure compliance with security, regulatory, and audit requirements
• Lead disaster recovery (DR) planning, testing, and high-availability strategies
• Champion continuous improvement, DevOps, and SRE culture within mainframe operations

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in mainframe systems engineering or operations
• Strong hands-on expertise with IBM z/OS
• Experience with core mainframe components such as:

• CICS, IMS, DB2
• JES2/JES3
• MQ, SMF, SDSF
• Solid understanding of mainframe performance tuning and capacity planning
• Experience leading production support and managing major incidents
• Strong scripting and automation skills (REXX, JCL, CLIST, Python, or equivalent)
• Familiarity with monitoring and scheduling tools (e.g., OMEGAMON, CA/BMC tools, Control-M)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience applying SRE principles in a mainframe or hybrid (mainframe + distributed) environment
• Exposure to DevOps, CI/CD, and automation frameworks
• Knowledge of Linux on Z and cloud integration patterns
• Experience with resilience engineering, chaos testing, or fault injection concepts
• Prior people-lead or technical-lead experience