Mainframe Production Support Specialist

We are seeking a Mainframe Production Support Specialist to join a technology team supporting critical payment and client connectivity services.

This is a hands-on production support role focused on maintaining service stability, troubleshooting incidents, coordinating technical recovery, and supporting ongoing operational improvements. The role is approximately 70% L2 support and 30% L3 support, with a strong emphasis on traditional mainframe technologies.

Key Responsibilities

Production Support & Incident Management

• Provide technical production support and respond to system and service-related issues.
• Investigate incidents and identify immediate solutions or mitigations to restore services quickly.
• Troubleshoot issues across mainframe applications, infrastructure, scheduling, and connected systems.
• Work alongside the Incident Manager and coordinate with technical teams during major incidents.
• Communicate technical findings, service impact, recovery progress, and action plans to relevant stakeholders.
• Escalate critical issues appropriately and support incidents through to resolution.

Problem Management & Continuous Improvement

• Participate in post-incident reviews and root-cause analysis.
• Identify recurring production issues and recommend improvements.
• Create and maintain knowledge articles, runbooks, and operational documentation.
• Help improve service stability and reduce incident resolution times.

Change & Release Support

• Participate in change and release activities while following established policies and control requirements.
• Support activities such as role swaps, disaster recovery testing, patching, and system evergreening.
• Identify and communicate potential risks during change planning and implementation.

Operational Support

• Work effectively in a global, virtual team environment.
• Support changing priorities and multiple technical issues simultaneously.
• Provide support outside standard business hours when required.
• Participate in a weekend support rotation approximately once every 4 weeks.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of overall IT experience, with strong production support experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with mainframe technologies.
• Experience supporting production environments and resolving technical incidents.
• Strong knowledge of:
• COBOL
• CICS
• DB2
• MQ
• TWS
• SPUFI
• Experience with incident, problem, change, and release management processes.
• Experience with disaster recovery practices.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
• Experience working with APIs and mainframe technologies.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate with technical teams across multiple regions.
• Ability to work flexible schedules, including weekend rotation and occasional support outside standard hours.
• Familiarity with AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot and/or Claude.

Nice to Have

• Experience in banking, particularly corporate banking or payments.
• Knowledge of banking payment systems.
• Experience with:
• SQL
• Java/J2EE
• Unix
• Oracle
• MQ
• WebSphere
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as:
• AppDynamics
• Splunk
• Geneos
• Network knowledge.
• ITIL accreditation.