Mainframe Tech Lead /Solution Architect

Description
The engagement supports a maintenance assessment and advisory for a legacy mainframe environment built primarily on COBOL, running mission-critical batch and online workloads. The objective is to establish a fact-based understanding of the current application estate and its support model, and to define a scoped, low risk maintenance pilot as the basis for a potential longer term managed services engagement.
The initial advisory phase is an assessment structured in three stages: a scope-alignment workshop to agree services, ownership, and boundaries; a current-state assessment of the code estate, data, batch/online flows, operations, and ticket history to establish baselines and pain points; and a pilot-identification stage to prioritize candidate use cases and define objectives and success metrics. The phase is diagnostic in nature — it covers evaluation, characterization, and effort estimation only, with no code remediation or production changes performed during assessment. Success depends heavily on timely access to client subject-matter experts and to the target environment.
Requirements
Deep mainframe experience on COBOL-based estates.
Hands-on experience with Hitachi VOS-family mainframes and the XDM/DCCM3 and XDM/RD stack (or demonstrable deep equivalence from IBM CICS/IMS-DC and DB2, with willingness to ramp on the Hitachi dialect)
Proven ability to characterize a multi-million-LOC estate across online, batch, data, and integration tiers and translate it into complexity and criticality assessments.
Experience defining maintenance or support operating models (roles, SLAs, runbooks, escalation) for legacy systems.
Able to critically validate AI-generated analysis against source code and SME input before it informs decisions.
Able to lead technical discovery and deep-dives directly with client subject-matter experts.
Strong stakeholder-facing communication, including presenting findings and recommendations to senior audiences.
Job responsibilities
Own the technical discovery and characterization of the legacy mainframe COBOL estate.
Produce complexity, criticality, and maintainability assessments of applications, batch flows, and integrations.
Map application, data, and batch dependencies to identify risks and single points of failure.
Oversee AI-assisted analysis and validate machine-generated findings against source and SME input before use.
Define the proposed target maintenance operating model and support approach.
Scope and prioritize candidate use cases for a subsequent maintenance pilot.
Direct the work of the team and consolidate outputs into architectural findings.
Present assessment outcomes, risks, and recommendations to client and internal stakeholders.