Lead PL/I Design & Development Consultant

Lead PL/I Design and Development Consultant

We require a highly experienced, hands-on PL/I design and development consultant to provide technical leadership to the existing development team.

Team comprises experienced former COBOL developers who have approximately three to four years’ experience developing and supporting the PL/I-based ManTec application. The consultant will complement the team by bringing substantial experience from significant PL/I initiatives and deep expertise in complex application design, development, troubleshooting and performance tuning.

This is not a production support, routine maintenance or general development capacity role. The consultant will lead complex technical analysis and design, work hands-on with the code, provide technical assurance, and help the existing team resolve the most demanding engineering challenges.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the technical analysis and detailed design of complex PL/I application changes.
• Establish practical design and development approaches for the Phoenix solution.
• Undertake hands-on development of complex or high-risk PL/I components.
• Analyse large and complex existing PL/I codebases, including online, batch and integration processing.
• Lead complex troubleshooting, root-cause analysis and performance-tuning activities.
• Review technical designs and code produced by the development team.
• Identify technical risks, design weaknesses and potential implementation issues.
• Work collaboratively with the development team to resolve complex engineering problems.
• Support technical estimation, development planning, testing, implementation and production-readiness activities.
• Provide technical leadership while strengthening the team’s PL/I capability through practical knowledge transfer.

Mandatory experience and capabilities

• Extensive commercial experience designing and developing enterprise applications in PL/I on IBM mainframe platforms.
• A career depth typically associated with 20 or more years of relevant mainframe application experience, preferably within banking, insurance or a similarly complex regulated environment.
• Demonstrated experience delivering significant PL/I development, migration, remediation or modernisation initiatives.
• Substantial hands-on involvement across solution design, detailed technical design, build, testing, implementation, troubleshooting and tuning.
• Deep technical knowledge of VSAM, including complex file structures, access patterns, performance, concurrency, integrity and recoverability.
• Deep practical knowledge of IBM MQ, including application integration, message processing, exception handling, diagnostics and performance.
• Demonstrated ability to understand and safely modify large, complex and potentially poorly documented legacy applications.
• Strong diagnostic and problem-solving capability across online, batch, data-access and integration processing.
• Experience providing hands-on technical leadership, design assurance and code review within an established development team.
• Ability to work effectively with experienced developers without duplicating responsibilities or operating purely as an adviser.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the production of clear technical designs and implementation guidance.

Desirable experience

• Good working knowledge of Db2, particularly for evaluating solution options or comparing Db2 and VSAM data-access approaches.
• Experience with CICS and high-volume mainframe transaction-processing applications.
• Experience within banking, insurance or another highly regulated industry.
• Experience with complex financial calculations, batch processing, reconciliation and regulatory processing.
• Experience migrating or restructuring PL/I applications to remove a legacy database dependency.
• Familiarity with mainframe performance-monitoring, debugging and diagnostic toolsets.