Principal Engineer

Job Purpose

In the role you will

• Develop IT solutions that meet customer requirements, ensuring robust, appropriate, and high-quality designs conforming to corporate standards and the technology strategy.
• Own, manage, and maintain solution designs of complex/large projects, products, environments, or platforms.
• Provide expert technical consultancy and guidance within the technology domain and act as a lead technical expert in delivering infrastructure solutions.
• Contribute to the development and maintenance of Architecture Guiding Principles, drawing on architectural knowledge and experience.
• Lead corporate IT Standards, analysing and understanding the potential impact of competing technologies, assessing their strategic significance, defining their strategic role and scope, roadmap, and relationship to existing standards.
• Track technology and business innovations, determine how they relate to IT strategy, existing standards, platforms, and patterns, and lead the work to amend existing assets and/or create new assets.
• Ensure implemented solutions meet service level requirements in terms of expected availability, capacity, continuity, security, performance, and reliability.
• Identify and define standards and metrics on the relevant technology, monitor current performance, and ensure appropriate levels of capacity, quality, service level, and resources are optimally tuned.
• Publish and maintain high-quality documentation for the technology area, including detailed design, configuration details, support procedures, operations manuals, and architecture deployment.
• Manage End of Life replacement of equipment and/or software within the technology domain to ensure conformance to technical standards and support technology initiatives and directions.
• Ensure operational and information security risks are identified, tracked, and mitigated promptly.
• Lead solution and technical design review, ensuring that projects follow agreed corporate strategic direction and alignment to architectural standards and patterns.

Qualification

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• IBM Mainframe certifications are highly desirable.
• 10+ years of hands-on experience designing, engineering, administering, and supporting enterprise-scale IBM Mainframe environments, ideally within large, complex, and highly regulated organisations.
• Extensive experience serving as a senior technical lead, architect, or subject matter expert for Mainframe platforms, with responsibility for defining technology roadmaps, architecture standards, engineering best practices, and long-term platform strategy.
• Deep expertise across IBM Z Systems and z/OS technologies, including JES2/JES3, WLM, SMP/E, RACF, DFSMS/SMS, HCD, Parallel Sysplex, VSAM, IBM MQ, WebSphere, batch processing, scheduling, automation, and high-volume OLTP environments.
• Proven experience managing mission-critical Mainframe infrastructure, including platform availability, resilience, capacity planning, performance tuning, RMF/SMF analysis, workload optimisation, and complex root cause analysis.
• Strong background in Mainframe storage and I/O engineering, including IBM DS8000, DASD administration, allocating, sizing, resizing and managing volumes, DFSMS/SMS, Virtual Tape Systems, FlashCopy, Safeguarded Copy, storage replication technologies, capacity forecasting, and performance optimisation
• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting Mainframe networking, middleware, and integration solutions, including TCP/IP, z/OS Communications Server, IBM MQ, WebSphere, secure communications, enterprise connectivity, Hybrid Cloud integration and understanding of SDN concepts.
• Proven track record leading Mainframe modernisation, transformation, and automation initiatives, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC), AIOps, intelligent monitoring, REXX scripting, IBM System Automation, and operational efficiency programmes.
• Extensive experience designing, implementing, and testing high-availability, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and business continuity solutions, including Parallel Sysplex, GDPS, Cyber Vaulting, immutable backups, ransomware recovery preparedness, and recovery testing against defined RTO and RPO o
• Strong expertise in Mainframe security, governance, risk, and compliance, including RACF administration, privileged access management, encryption technologies, security monitoring, audit remediation, technical risk management, regulatory compliance, and the management of technical debt and platform
• Demonstrated ability to influence and engage senior stakeholders, executive leadership, technology partners, and cross-functional engineering teams, with experience mentoring engineers, driving technical excellence, and supporting strategic technology investment decisions.

Salary & benefits

• Join us in a management role and enjoy an attractive tax-free salary.
• Generous travel benefits, including discounted flights and hotel stays around the world.
• Excellent leave and healthcare package, transport benefits, life insurance and more.