CICS SME Pod Lead

CTG is seeking to fill a CICS SME Pod Lead position for our client.

Location: Remote
Duration: 6 months
Shift: 8:00 AM EST – 5:00 PM EST (24x7 on-call support rotation required for evenings and weekends)

Duties:

• Lead the administration, support, and maintenance of IBM CICS environments within a large-scale z/OS infrastructure.
• Serve as the technical SME and Pod Lead for CICS platform operations, ensuring system stability, availability, and performance.
• Manage and support CICS regions, transactions, resource definitions, and middleware configurations.
• Perform installation, configuration, maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting of CICS and related mainframe infrastructure components.
• Monitor system health, analyze performance metrics, and implement tuning recommendations.
• Coordinate incident response, problem resolution, and root cause analysis for complex infrastructure issues.
• Oversee ticket prioritization, workload distribution, and technical guidance for support team members.
• Collaborate with cross-functional infrastructure teams supporting z/OS, storage, networking, security, and middleware technologies.
• Ensure compliance with security standards, operational procedures, and change management processes.
• Support planned maintenance activities, disaster recovery testing, and production implementations.
• Participate in a 24x7 support model, including scheduled on-call rotations for weekdays and weekends.
• Document system configurations, operational procedures, and technical solutions.

Skills:

• Expert knowledge of IBM CICS administration, systems programming, and middleware management.
• Strong experience with z/OS platform administration and enterprise mainframe infrastructure.
• Experience with mainframe storage management and system performance optimization.
• Knowledge of SMP/E, RACF, JES2/JES3, VTAM, TCP/IP, and other z/OS infrastructure components.
• Strong troubleshooting, diagnostic, and performance tuning skills.
• Experience supporting highly available, mission-critical production environments.
• Familiarity with change management, automation, monitoring, and operational best practices.
• Excellent leadership, mentoring, organizational, and communication skills.
• Ability to prioritize multiple production issues while maintaining service level commitments.

Experience:

• 15+ years of experience in mainframe infrastructure administration.
• Extensive experience administering IBM CICS in enterprise production environments.
• Strong background in z/OS systems administration, middleware, storage, and platform management.
• Experience providing technical leadership and coordinating infrastructure support teams.
• Proven experience supporting 24x7 production operations and participating in on-call rotations.
• Experience with system installations, upgrades, migrations, maintenance, and performance tuning.
• Infrastructure administration experience is required; application development-focused backgrounds are not suitable for this role.

Preferred Background:
Candidates should have strong experience in infrastructure administration rather than application development. Backgrounds primarily focused on COBOL, PL/I, JCL development, CICS application development, IMS application development, DB2 application programming, Java on z/OS, web services development, mainframe application maintenance, or application support are not aligned with this position.

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline preferred.
• Equivalent combination of education and extensive enterprise mainframe experience will be considered.

Excellent verbal and written English communication skills and the ability to interact professionally with a diverse group are required.

CTG does not accept unsolicited resumes from headhunters, recruitment agencies, or fee based recruitment services for this role.

To Apply:
To be considered, please apply directly to this requisition using the link provided. Kindly forward this to any other interested parties. Thank you!

The expected base salary for this position ranges from $54-$68/hr. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including relevant skills, training, experience, education, market factors, and where applicable, licensure or certifications obtained. In addition to salary, a competitive benefit package is also offered.