Position Overview
We are seeking an experienced IBM i professional to take ownership of the administration, reliability, maintenance, and technical evolution of our IBM Power environment supporting Epicor CMS 5.3. This is a hands-on role combining IBM i systems administration, RPG/CL and Db2 for i application support, upgrade planning, and infrastructure advisory responsibilities.
The successful candidate will maintain day-to-day operations while helping us plan capacity growth, deliver new functionality, and evaluate future hosting and modernization options.
Key responsibilities:
IBM i administration and operational reliability
- Administer production and non-production IBM i environments.
- Perform daily health checks and monitor jobs, subsystems, queues, messages, storage utilization, and system performance.
- Manage backups, retention, recovery procedures, and scheduled restore testing.
- Investigate incidents, resolve operational problems, and document corrective actions.
- Maintain user profiles, object authorities, service accounts, and access controls.
- Maintain operating procedures, configuration records, and support documentation.
- Coordinate hardware, storage, operating-system, and vendor support activities.
Updates, upgrades, and change management
- Develop and maintain an IBM i OS, PTF, and application-maintenance roadmap.
- Plan IBM i and Epicor CMS updates and upgrades in coordination with application vendors and business stakeholders.
- Assess compatibility, dependencies, downtime, licensing, and recovery requirements.
- Establish test environments, regression-test plans, deployment procedures, and rollback plans.
- Document and control production changes, source code, and configuration changes.
Application support and customization maintenance
- Analyze, debug, modify, and maintain RPG, CL, DDS, and SQL-based components.
- Inventory and document existing application customizations, interfaces, reports, and batch processes.
- Assess how OS or ERP changes may affect customized components.
- Remediate, recompile, or adapt customizations as required following supported upgrade procedures.
- Validate critical business processes, integrations, reports, and data integrity before and after deployment.
- Work with Epicor or its support partners on vendor-controlled changes and escalations.
Capacity, new functionality, and future architecture
- Assess resource utilization and forecast capacity requirements.
- Recommend practical options for additional processing, memory, storage, resilience, and performance.
- Translate new business requirements into technical designs and implementation plans.
- Evaluate on-premises, hosted IBM i, cloud, and hybrid options.
- Prepare migration approaches covering dependencies, security, cost, connectivity, cutover, testing, and recovery.
- Explain recommendations and trade-offs clearly to management.
Required qualifications
- Demonstrated hands-on ownership of production IBM i environments.
- Strong backup, recovery, work-management, security, maintenance, and troubleshooting skills.
- Experience planning and executing IBM i upgrades and application changes.
- Strong RPG/ILE RPG, CL/CLLE, Db2 for i SQL, and legacy application troubleshooting skills.
- Experience maintaining customized enterprise applications through upgrades.
- Ability to design and execute regression testing and rollback procedures.
- Experience with capacity assessment, technical documentation, and vendor coordination.
- Clear communication skills and a disciplined approach to production changes.
Preferred qualifications
- Epicor CMS experience, particularly CMS 5.3 or a relevant upgrade path.
- Manufacturing-system and integration support experience.
- POWER9/POWER10, HMC, LPAR, and storage administration.
- Disaster recovery, high availability, PowerHA, and recovery exercises.
- IBM i hosting or cloud-migration experience.
- Modern IBM i development tooling, source control, and controlled use of AI-assisted development tools
