Senior Associate - Mainframe Operations Engineer

 

Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per quarter 

 

 

Be a key engineering owner for New York Life’s mainframe production environment, with a focus on JES2, IDMS, Db2, and ESP workload scheduling. You’ll keep critical batch and online workloads running reliably, tune performance, engineer automation, and drive standards for change, monitoring, and incident response. 

You’ll work closely with application teams, DBAs, infrastructure, and SRE/observability partners to ensure our mainframe services are stable, performant, secure, and audit-ready. 

 

What You’ll Do 

Run & Support Mainframe Operations 

• Operate and support JES2 on z/OS, ensuring reliable spool management, initiator configuration, and job throughput. 

• Monitor and support IDMS and Db2 subsystems (online and batch), resolving issues impacting availability and performance. 

• Support related mainframe components such as CICS regions, MQ managers, VTAM, TCP/IP stacks, and VSAM datasets as they impact workloads. 

• Handle day-to-day operations: startup/shutdown procedures, IPL support, system maintenance windows, and health checks. 

Batch, ESP Scheduling & Online Workload Management 

• Configure, maintain, and troubleshoot ESP (or equivalent CA/Broadcom scheduler) workloads, calendars, events, and dependencies. 

• Support scheduling and execution of batch workloads that depend on JES2, IDMS, Db2, and ESP, including coordination with enterprise scheduling and workload automation teams. 

• Troubleshoot failing jobs (JCL, ESP definitions, utilities, data issues) and work with app teams to implement permanent fixes. 

• Optimize batch windows, parallelism, and resource usage to meet SLA and cutoff times. 

Performance, Capacity & Tuning 

• Analyze JES2, IDMS, Db2, ESP, and related subsystem metrics/logs to identify bottlenecks and tuning opportunities. 

• Work with system programmers and DBAs to adjust parameters, buffer pools, access paths, storage allocations, and ESP schedules. 

• Participate in capacity planning for CPU, memory, channels, and storage based on business growth and new workloads. 

Reliability, Resilience & Change Management 

• Implement and maintain standard restart/rerun patterns for mainframe jobs and transactions (e.g., step restarts, checkpoint/restart, idempotent designs). 

• Support DR exercises and failover testing for mainframe systems, ensuring IDMS and Db2 participate effectively in recovery scenarios. 

• Align all changes with change management and release processes, including risk assessments and back-out plans. 

Monitoring, Observability & Automation 

• Integrate JES2, IDMS, Db2, and ESP with monitoring and logging tools; build dashboards and alerts for health and SLA tracking. 

• Tune alert thresholds to reduce noise while catching genuine issues early. 

• Develop automation (REXX, CLISTs, JCL procedures, OPS/MVS or equivalent) to reduce manual steps and handle common operational tasks and ESP actions. 

Incident Response & Problem Management 

• Serve as SME during incidents impacting mainframe workloads; quickly triage, diagnose, and restore service for JES2/IDMS/Db2/ESP issues. 

• Provide detailed technical input to p