IBM i Systems Admin

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