Senior Mainframe System Programmer - Capacity Management

Software International (SI) supplies technical talent to a variety of clients ranging from Fortune 100/500/1000 companies to small and mid-sized organizations in Canada/US.

We have a Permanent or 12 month renewable contract as a Senior Mainframe System Programmer - Capacity Management with our large consulting client, working on a long term project for one of Canada's largest banks. This could be an indefinite contract or a permanent role.

Role: Senior Mainframe System Programmer - Capacity Management

Type: Permanent or Long Term Contract

Duration: 12 months to start + possible multiple extensions or a permanent role

Salary or Rate: approximately $180,000 - $230,000 + bonus as permanent employee or $100 - $130/hr + C2C - depending on overall experience

Location: Remote, Toronto, ON, Canada

As a Sr. Mainframe System Programmer, Capacity Management, you are responsible for providing technical direction and subject matter expertise to ensure stable, reliable environments for complex sharing initiatives in compliance with established controls, standards, policies, and procedures. You will collaborate with and advise senior management, utilizing your solid understanding of business dynamics to analyze and protect test environment integrity and mitigate risks, present alternative solutions, and recommend solutions using available resources for complex initiatives with key dependencies. You will provide technical leadership, interpret complex information, and coordinate client, provider, and vendor relationships to meet and manage service expectations, aligned to best practices. In addition, you will help to develop the team to maximize individual contributions and professional growth, while functioning effectively with your colleagues.

How you'll succeed

• Technical Expertise you will leverage your solid technology expertise to review and analyze mainframe resource and capacity data to ensure the most effective use of computing and storage resources; author and update capacity plans for the mainframe platform; project input into mainframe refresh initiatives, and upgrades; provide assistance to mainframe billing inquiries from end-user teams. You will also be responsible for preparing mainframe capacity assessments to application development teams for project related workload changes.
• Effective Communication you will work to accomplish organizational goals that are consistent in supporting both IT and Business objectives, communicate effectively and patiently across technology teams to influence teams to adopt solutions to keep critical systems secure and operationally resilient. You will provide and document problem analysis, resolution, and prevention, designing procedures and best practice techniques, using IBM and ISV online tools for opening and managing problem report tracking and resolution. You will actively participate in periodic disaster recovery exercises, maintaining disaster recovery readiness of systems, and monitoring status of systems to proactively prevent issues from occurring.
• Relationship Management You will collaborate with internal business partners in Application Development, Infrastructure, IT Operations, and IT Production Support to accomplish organizational goals that are consistent in supporting both IT and Business objectives. You will work directly with Hardware and Software vendors on solutions, build your network, and deepen existing relationships. You will leverage your verbal, written, and presentation communication skills to build strong partnerships, while influencing participants to mutually beneficial outcomes.

Who you are

• You can demonstrate a minimum of 8 years' experience in Mainframe Capacity Management roles. You also have
  • Experience with interactive capacity management tools including MICS, MXG, iZPCA.
  • Strong understanding and can demonstrate experience working with SMF data.
  • Performed capacity requirement assessments for CPU upgrades and refreshes including the ability to perform what-if impact models.
  • Past experience reconciling mainframe billing codes to workloads.
  • Experience performing complex calculations to estimate workload impacts in terms of MIPS and/or MSUs across multiple data centers and sysplexes.
  • Understand zIIP and IFL utilization.
  • Experience with SAS Programming.
  • Ability to proactively identify CPU cost-savings opportunities.
  • A firm understanding of IBM Mainframe CPU concepts including CBUs and OOCoD, and you can configure mainframe tools such as MICS, MXG, iZPCA, build reports and view data from these tools.