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.