Lead Mainframe Hardware Engineer

Role overview Provide senior technical leadership for mainframe hardware supporting critical business applications in a large, regulated environment. The role oversees the hardware lifecycle from planning and procurement through installation, production support, refresh, and secure retirement, while advancing resiliency, security, automation, and responsible AI use.

Responsibilities - Coordinate installations, upgrades, migrations, and decommissions, covering site readiness, cabling, power, connectivity, schedules, and change approvals. - Maintain stability, resiliency, and service levels across processors, storage, tape, fabric, replication, consoles, and timing infrastructure. - Lead lifecycle planning, procurement, technology evaluations, refreshes, secure sanitization, and disposal of data-bearing equipment. - Manage vendor teams, access, delivery issues, service commitments, and escalations. - Improve security and recovery through patching, encryption, privileged access, secure logging, and audit-ready inventory and lifecycle evidence. - Expand API-based automation and guide the team’s use of AI for configuration analysis, change preparation, troubleshooting, and compliance evidence.

Requirements - Extensive mainframe hardware engineering experience in a large, regulated environment. - Strong knowledge of IBM Z environments, storage and tape, FICON or SAN fabrics, replication, and hardware management consoles. - Proven leadership of complex installations, configuration work, migrations, and decommissions involving multiple teams. - Experience managing major hardware vendors, service levels, and escalations. - Understanding of infrastructure security, change and asset management, and audit requirements. - Strong communication with senior leaders and nontechnical partners, plus experience leading and developing technical staff.

Nice to have - Mainframe hardware installation and resiliency design experience, including Brocade SAN or FICON fabric. - Hands-on work with automation, APIs, scripting, or orchestration, or applying AI tools to infrastructure or compliance work.

Benefits and work setup - Regular weekend work is required for maintenance windows and hardware changes. Participation in an on-call escalation rotation requires availability outside normal business hours.