Job Title: Mainframe IBM MQ Engineer
Location: Chandler, AZ; Plano, TX; Charlotte, NC; Jersey City, NJ
Job Type: Contract
Duration: 6–12 Months
Work Arrangement: Hybrid | 3 Days Onsite and 2 Days Work From Home
Pay Rate: $55–$60/hr
Note: This job doesn't offer any benefits.
Position Overview
We are seeking an experienced Mainframe IBM MQ Engineer with strong hands-on expertise in IBM MQ for z/OS to support highly available, business-critical mainframe environments. The role focuses on MQ administration, configuration, security, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and lifecycle management.
Required Qualifications
- Strong hands-on experience with IBM MQ for z/OS.
- Strong knowledge of queue managers, local and remote queues, transmission queues, MQ channels, channel initiators, listeners, and dead-letter queues.
- Experience with distributed queuing, MQ clustering, MQ security, logging, recovery, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
- Strong working knowledge of IBM z/OS.
- Experience developing and maintaining JCL.
- Good understanding of TCP/IP and network connectivity.
- Experience troubleshooting MQ issues and supporting production environments.
- Experience supporting high-volume, business-critical mainframe systems.
- Understanding of change, incident, and problem management processes.
Responsibilities
IBM MQ Administration & Configuration
- Install, configure, administer, and support IBM MQ for z/OS environments.
- Create, configure, and maintain queue managers, local and remote queues, transmission queues, channels, listeners, and other MQ objects.
- Perform routine MQ administration, monitoring, maintenance, and operational support.
- Configure and maintain distributed queuing between queue managers.
- Administer and troubleshoot IBM MQ clusters and messaging infrastructure.
Monitoring & Troubleshooting
- Monitor queue depths, channel status, queue manager availability, message flow, and overall infrastructure health.
- Troubleshoot channel failures, queue manager issues, message delivery problems, and messages remaining on queues.
- Resolve connectivity issues, security and authorization failures, and application-to-MQ communication problems.
- Perform problem determination and root cause analysis for production incidents.
- Support MQ recovery, restart, and service restoration activities.
Security & Connectivity
- Implement and maintain MQ security in collaboration with security and RACF teams.
- Configure and troubleshoot channel authentication, connection authentication, TLS, and MQ access controls, where applicable.
- Support TCP/IP connectivity and secure communication between applications and queue managers.
- Maintain reliable MQ integration with mainframe applications and enterprise infrastructure.
Performance, Maintenance & Resiliency
- Analyze MQ performance and implement tuning recommendations.
- Support MQ upgrades, migrations, patching, maintenance, and lifecycle management.
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity requirements.
- Develop and maintain JCL, automation scripts, operational procedures, and technical documentation.
- Participate in production implementations, change management, incident management, and problem management.
- Provide on-call and after-hours support for critical production issues as required.
Application & Infrastructure Integration
- Support IBM MQ integration with CICS and IMS applications.
- Collaborate with application, network, security, operations, and systems programming teams.
- Support MQ communication across complex enterprise mainframe environments.
- Ensure reliable messaging services for high-volume, business-critical applications.
Preferred Technical Skills
- CICS and IBM MQ integration.
- IMS and IBM MQ integration.
- RACF security administration.
- TCP/IP networking.
- REXX scripting.
- TSO/ISPF.
- SDSF.
- SMP/E software maintenance.
- IBM Sysplex environments.
- MQ Queue Sharing Groups.
- Automation and monitoring tools.
- Enterprise scheduling tools such as CA7 or TWS.
- Disaster recovery and business continuity.
- Performance monitoring and capacity management.
- Managed File Transfer (MFT).