Job Summary
The CICS & MQ System Programmer owns the health, currency, and integration readiness of the transaction processing and messaging backbone of the mainframe estate. This includes full lifecycle management of CICS regions and IBM MQ queue managers, leading migrations between competing vendor utilities (e.g., CA DADS Plus to SAS CAFC or equivalent), and enabling integration between CICS/MQ and modern application and API tooling.
Key Responsibilities
- Install, upgrade, and maintain CICS Transaction Server regions, CICS Transaction Gateway, CICSPlex SM, and related middleware components.
- Install, upgrade, and maintain IBM MQ for z/OS, including queue manager configuration, queue-sharing groups, IPIC, MRO and clustering.
- Lead migration projects between vendor utilities supporting CICS/MQ operations (e.g., CA DADS Plus to SAS CAFC or IBM CBAC or MacKinney Batch/CICS, or equivalent abend/dump/file analysis tool transitions).
- Enable and support integration of CICS/MQ with Db2/IMS and zOS Connect and modern toolchains — CICS TS APIs, Liberty for z/OS, containerized workloads, and API management layers.
- Design and implement high-availability and disaster recovery topologies for CICS (multi-region operation, VSAM RLS) and MQ (queue-sharing groups, clustering, disaster recovery replication).
- Perform CICS/MQ performance tuning, capacity monitoring, and abend/dump analysis using industry-standard diagnostic tools.
- Perform Proof-of-concept (POC) on Sandbox LPAR to build & test the use-cases using different vendor products which are found promising and establish the documentation proof of benefits realization after POC completion.
- Coordinate with application development and DevOps teams to support modernization initiatives touching CICS/MQ workloads.
Maintain security posture for CICS regions and MQ objects in coordination with the RACF/ACF2 administration