Senior AIX Engineer

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior AIX Platform Engineer to join our Infrastructure Engineering team responsible for designing, engineering, automating, and continuously improving the IBM Power Systems platform that supports critical enterprise and banking applications.

This role focuses on platform architecture, infrastructure automation, configuration management, engineering standards, and lifecycle strategy rather than routine operational support. The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise in IBM Power Systems, AIX engineering, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), Ansible automation development, and enterprise platform modernization.

The successful candidate will collaborate with architecture, application, security, infrastructure, and operations teams to build scalable, secure, resilient, and highly automated platform solutions.

Platform Engineering & Architecture

• Design, engineer, and implement enterprise AIX platform solutions supporting mission-critical applications.
• Develop platform standards, reference architectures, and engineering best practices.
• Evaluate and implement emerging IBM Power and AIX technologies.
• Lead platform modernization initiatives and lifecycle management strategies.
• Engineer highly available, scalable, and resilient infrastructure solutions.
• Partner with architecture teams on strategic platform roadmaps.

Infrastructure Automation & Ansible Development

• Serve as the primary engineering lead for enterprise AIX automation initiatives.
• Design, develop, test, and maintain complex Ansible automation solutions supporting platform provisioning, configuration management, patching, compliance, and lifecycle operations.
• Develop reusable Ansible roles, collections, playbooks, inventories, and automation frameworks.
• Build CI/CD integration for infrastructure automation workflows.
• Create Infrastructure-as-Code standards and governance models.
• Develop automated compliance validation, security remediation, and configuration drift detection capabilities.
• Engineer self-service provisioning and platform automation capabilities.
• Establish automation coding standards, peer review processes, and software development best practices for infrastructure code.

IBM Power Systems Engineering

• Engineer and support IBM Power platforms including Power9, Power10, and future generations.
• Design and optimize virtualization architectures utilizing PowerVM, VIOS, and LPAR technologies.
• Lead platform migrations, hardware refreshes, and infrastructure modernization projects.
• Engineer performance, scalability, and resilience improvements across the platform.

Security Engineering & Compliance

• Partner with cybersecurity teams to engineer secure-by-design platform solutions.
• Develop automated compliance and remediation solutions leveraging Ansible.
• Implement security hardening standards using Infrastructure-as-Code methodologies.
• Engineer solutions that support compliance with:
  • FFIEC
  • PCI-DSS
  • SOX
  • NIST
  • CIS Benchmarks
  • Enterprise Security Standards

Reliability Engineering & Continuous Improvement

• Identify opportunities to eliminate manual processes through automation.
• Develop proactive monitoring, observability, and predictive maintenance capabilities.
• Lead root cause analysis efforts to identify engineering improvements and preventative controls.
• Drive platform reliability, performance optimization, and technical debt reduction initiatives.

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to fellow engineers.
• Establish engineering standards, coding practices, and platform governance.
• Conduct design reviews and provide guidance on infrastructure engineering initiatives.
• Collaborate across infrastructure, security, development, and cloud engineering organizations.

Qualifications:
Minimum Required Education and Experience: Bachelor's Degree and 8 years' experience OR High School Diploma or GED/Equivalent and 12 years' experience in Systems engineer including systems programmer, scripting, troubleshooting

• 10+ years of enterprise experience designing, engineering, and supporting IBM AIX environments.
• 10+ years of experience with IBM Power Systems platforms.
• Expert-level knowledge of:
  • IBM AIX 7.x
  • IBM Power Systems (Power9, Power10)
  • PowerVM
  • LPAR
  • VIOS
  • HMC
  • NIM
• 7+ years of hands-on Ansible development experience.
• Expert-level proficiency developing Ansible playbooks, roles, collections, modules, inventories, templates, and automation frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience building enterprise-scale Infrastructure-as-Code solutions using Ansible.
• Strong software engineering mindset with experience applying source control, code review, testing, versioning, and CI/CD practices to infrastructure automation.
• Experience integrating Ansible with ServiceNow, GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or similar enterprise platforms.
• Ability to design highly reusable and modular automation frameworks that support provisioning, compliance, security remediation, patching, configuration management, and lifecycle operations.
• Experience building automated compliance and policy enforcement solutions through Ansible.
• Strong understanding of YAML, Jinja2 templating, REST APIs, and automation orchestration concepts.

Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.