Field CTO – Mainframe Modernization

Who we are:

About the Role

Responsibilities

• Mainframe Architecture and Modernization
• Serve as a senior technical authority on mainframe systems, application and data architectures, transaction processing, and operational resilience.
• Lead the architectural understanding of how application logic, data models, transaction boundaries, batch workloads, and runtime behavior interact across complex mainframe estates, ensuring modernization preserves system-level correctness rather than merely functional equivalence.
• Work with customers’ most experienced architects to design target-state architectures that preserve business logic, concurrency, recovery, and operational guarantees.
• Guide decisions about what to translate, rearchitect, or retain, minimizing migration risk and protecting operational continuity.
• Platform and Offering Evolution
• Partner with Blitzy’s engineering, product, partnerships, and sales teams to improve how the platform discovers, transforms, and validates complex applications.
• Identify the most difficult and recurring challenges in mainframe modernization and work with engineering to turn their solutions into automated, reusable platform capabilities, progressively reducing the need for specialized human intervention.
• Help extend Blitzy’s World Model to capture relationships among business logic, application behavior, data, and runtime dependencies, creating a richer foundation for automated transformation and validation.
• Develop reusable validation approaches, reference architectures, and scalable service offerings; strengthen testing of functional equivalence, transactional integrity, and operational resilience.
• Explore emerging AI and autonomous engineering approaches with curiosity and technical rigor, making each successive migration easier.
• Customer and Executive Leadership
• Build trusted relationships with CIOs, CTOs, engineering leaders, and senior mainframe specialists, communicating credibly at both architectural and executive levels.
• Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, workshops, proofs of concept, and technical validation for complex modernization opportunities.
• Help customers articulate pragmatic long-term visions, connecting architecture choices to business outcomes, cost, risk, and strategic flexibility.
• Work closely with Partnerships, Enterprise Sales, AI Solutions Consultants, and Customer Success to support customer decisions, adoption, and expansion.
• Strategic Partner Engagement
• Serve as a senior technical counterpart to cloud providers, global systems integrators, and specialist modernization partners.
• Build relationships with partner CTOs, distinguished engineers, architects, and delivery leaders; establish confidence in Blitzy’s technical approach.
• Co-design joint solutions, reference architectures, technical validation frameworks, and repeatable delivery methods partners can take to enterprise customers.
• Support joint workshops and customer engagements, bringing implementation insights back into Blitzy’s product and service roadmap.
• Technical and Market Leadership
• Help define Blitzy’s long-term technical vision for mainframe modernization, challenging conventional approaches and identifying opportunities to fundamentally change how complex enterprise systems are understood, transformed, and operated.
• Contribute technical thought leadership through executive conversations, partner engagement, and selected industry forums.
• Promote practical problem-solving, technical rigor, intellectual curiosity, and continuous learning.

Qualifications

• Deep, hands-on knowledge of IBM Z and z/OS, including technologies such as CICS, Db2, IMS, JCL, VSAM, Parallel Sysplex, RACF, MQ, and batch scheduling, with particular depth in several of these areas.
• Demonstrated ability to reason about complex mainframe application behavior, data dependencies, transaction integrity, concurrency, recovery, and security—not simply COBOL syntax or hardware.
• Strong understanding of modern distributed systems, cloud architectures, and enterprise modernization, including tradeoffs involved in translating mainframe behavior into modern environments.
• Experience solving difficult technical problems in mission-critical enterprise systems and turning insights into practical modernization plans.
• Ability to earn the confidence of experienced systems engineers and senior technology executives alike.
• Passion for technology, customer outcomes, building better solutions, and learning about AI and autonomous software engineering.
• Willingness to work hands-on with customer, partner, engineering, and product teams rather than acting solely as an external advisor.
• Compensation: $250,000-$350,000 + Bonus + Equity
• Blitzy is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We believe different perspectives make us stronger. Base salary ranges are determined by country, role, level, experience, and skills. The range displayed on each job posting reflects Blitzy’s good faith determination of the minimum and maximum targets for new hire salaries across all locations. Individual pay is determined by related factors, including job skills, experience, and relevant education or training, which may impact a final offer. Your Talent Partner can share more about the specific salary range during the hiring process

Preferred Qualifications

• Compensation: $250,000-$350,000 + Bonus + Equity