Senior Specialist, z/OS Middleware (CICS & IBM MQ Series)
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
- Ottawa, ON
- $104,180-130,225 per year
- Permanent
- Full-time
- Annual Paid vacation.
- Annual individual performance incentive.
- Defined benefit pension plan.
- Comprehensive group insurance plan to support your well-being from day one.
- Support towards your personal and professional growth with training, mentorship and more.
- An inclusive workplace culture and environment.
- While positions at CMHC require some in-office presence, alternative work arrangements may be considered for Indigenous candidates.
Join the Infrastructure and Operations Team, in the Senior z/OS Middleware Specialist (CICS & IBM MQ Series) position. In this role you will be responsible for support, maintenance, and optimization of IBM mainframe middleware platforms, with a strong focus on IBM CICS and IBM MQ. This role acts as a subject-matter expert (SME), ensuring high availability, performance, and stability of mission-critical applications in a large, complex enterprise environment.What you'll do:
- Provide Level 3 support for IBM CICS and IBM MQ on z/OS, resolving complex production incidents.
- Install, configure, upgrade, and maintain CICS regions, MQ managers, queues, and channels.
- Monitor middleware health, availability, and performance for high-volume online transaction systems.
- Analyze and tune CICS and MQ performance, addressing throughput, latency, and capacity issues.
- Design and support high-availability, resilience, and disaster recovery solutions.
- Ensure compliance with security, audit, and regulatory standards, managing access controls and authorities.
- Lead root-cause analysis, implement permanent fixes, and support change and release activities.
- Act as a middleware SME, collaborating across teams and mentoring junior specialists.
- A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
- 7+ years of experience supporting IBM z/OS mainframe environments.
- Strong hands-on expertise with IBM CICS Transaction Server and IBM MQ for z/OS.
- Solid understanding of z/OS architecture, JCL, SDSF, SMF, and batch scheduling.
- Experience with RACF security concepts.
- Familiarity with DB2 connectivity in CICS environments.
- Experience with monitoring and automation tools (e.g., OMEGAMON, MainView, or equivalent).
- Proven experience supporting 24/7 mission-critical systems in large enterprises.
- IBM certifications in CICS, MQ, or z/OS are considered an asset.
- Experience with CICS TS upgrades, MQ clustering, and queue sharing groups.
- Exposure to z/OS Connect, APIs, or hybrid integration patterns.
- Knowledge of mainframe modernization or cloud integration initiatives.
- Scripting or automation experience (REXX, OPS/MVS, Ansible, etc.).