Mainframe COBOL/IMS Developer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Mainframe COBOL/IMS Developer based in United States.

The Mainframe COBOL/IMS Developer will support mission-critical mainframe applications powering payment processing, voucher payments, and financial reporting systems. This role combines hands-on COBOL development with deep expertise in IMS DB and IBM MQ technologies. You will maintain, enhance, troubleshoot, and modernize complex legacy applications while helping uncover business rules and system dependencies embedded in existing code. The position also involves reverse engineering applications with limited or unavailable source code and migrating legacy code into modern development repositories. You will collaborate with technical teams and business stakeholders to resolve production issues and deliver reliable system enhancements. This is an opportunity to contribute to essential financial technology while applying extensive mainframe expertise in a fully remote environment.

Accountabilities:

• Develop, maintain, enhance, troubleshoot, and provide production support for mission-critical mainframe applications supporting batch payment processing, voucher payments, financial reporting, and related business operations.
• Design, modify, and enhance COBOL programs using IMS DB and IBM MQ technologies, ensuring application changes meet functional requirements and established technical and quality standards.
• Upgrade and enhance MQ COBOL programs while supporting IBM MQ server migration initiatives and maintaining reliable integrations across dependent systems.
• Reverse engineer complex legacy COBOL and IMS applications, including environments where source code is incomplete, unavailable, or difficult to interpret, in order to recover business rules, application logic, dependencies, and processing workflows.
• Support and enhance ETBS MQ programs and their integrations with systems such as WMIS and Workday, ensuring reliable data exchange and stable production operations.
• Perform IMS development and administration activities, including troubleshooting, maintenance, performance support, and resolution of issues affecting application availability and processing.
• Analyze existing applications and system behavior to identify, document, and validate business rules, technical dependencies, business logic, interfaces, and end-to-end processing workflows.
• Create and maintain comprehensive technical documentation covering application architecture, processing logic, business rules, operational procedures, integrations, and system dependencies.
• Migrate legacy application code into modern source-code repositories and development environments, supporting improved maintainability, collaboration, version control, and development practices.
• Collaborate with technical teams, business stakeholders, and other project resources to investigate production issues, determine root causes, implement enhancements, and maintain application stability.
• Participate in testing, deployment, implementation, and post-production support activities, ensuring changes are thoroughly validated and delivered in accordance with established standards.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional mainframe programming experience, including at least 10 years working extensively with COBOL-based mainframe applications in enterprise production environments.
• Strong hands-on COBOL programming expertise combined with extensive experience developing and administering IMS DB environments.
• Extensive IBM MQ experience, including MQ COBOL programming, application integrations, troubleshooting, upgrades, and support for MQ server migration initiatives.
• Demonstrated experience supporting batch processing, payment systems, voucher processing, financial reporting applications, or similarly mission-critical transaction-processing environments.
• Proven experience maintaining, troubleshooting, deploying, and supporting production mainframe applications where system stability, reliability, and timely issue resolution are essential.
• Strong ability to reverse engineer complex legacy applications and extract business rules, application logic, dependencies, and processing behavior from existing code and system environments.
• Experience working with applications where source code is incomplete, unavailable, or otherwise difficult to access, requiring strong analytical skills and the ability to reconstruct system behavior from available evidence.
• Experience with IMS development and administration, including application troubleshooting, maintenance, performance support, and operational problem solving.
• Demonstrated experience upgrading and modifying MQ COBOL programs and supporting MQ server migrations and related integration activities.
• Experience supporting ETBS MQ programs and integrations involving systems such as WMIS and Workday is required.
• Strong technical writing and documentation skills, with the ability to clearly capture business rules, technical processes, application logic, system dependencies, and workflows.
• Experience migrating legacy code into modern source-code repositories and development environments.
• Strong analytical, debugging, troubleshooting, and problem-solving capabilities, with the ability to investigate complex systems and identify practical solutions.
• Excellent verbal and written English communication skills, with the ability to interact professionally and collaborate effectively with diverse technical and business stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or a related field is preferred; equivalent education combined with relevant professional experience may be considered.

Benefits:

• Base compensation of $50-$60 USD per hour.
• Six-month contract opportunity with the flexibility of fully remote work within the United States.
• Competitive benefits package offered in addition to base compensation.
• Opportunity to work on mission-critical financial and payment-processing applications while applying advanced COBOL, IMS DB, and IBM MQ expertise.
• Exposure to complex legacy modernization initiatives, including reverse engineering, source-code migration, system integration, and modernization of established mainframe environments.
• Opportunity to collaborate with technical and business stakeholders on production systems where reliability, stability, and operational excellence are critical.