Lead IBM i (AS/400) Infrastructure Design Engineer

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced IBM i Infrastructure Design Engineer to join our Infrastructure Engineering team. This role is responsible for the architecture, engineering, governance and highest-level technical support (L3/L3.5) of the organisation's IBM i (AS/400) platforms and associated IBM storage infrastructure.

The successful candidate will be a senior technical authority for IBM Power Systems, IBM i operating environments, high availability, backup, disaster recovery and storage platforms. The role combines deep IBM i expertise with broad infrastructure engineering knowledge and a strong focus on service reliability, automation, security and operational excellence.

The engineer will provide design leadership for the IBM i estate whilst acting as the senior escalation point for complex platform, operating system, storage and performance-related issues

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement and maintain enterprise IBM Power and IBM i infrastructure services.
• Own the architecture, standards and governance of the IBM i platform.
• Act as the L3/L3.5 escalation point for complex IBM i, Power Systems and storage-related incidents.
• Design and support high availability, replication, backup and disaster recovery solutions.
• Manage operating system upgrades, platform lifecycle management and infrastructure modernisation initiatives.
• Provide technical leadership for performance tuning, capacity planning and resilience improvements.
• Support and govern IBM storage systems used by the IBM i estate.
• Develop and maintain platform documentation, standards and operational processes.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, security, network, application and database teams to deliver stable and secure services.
• Develop and implement automation to simplify administration and operational activities.
• Support audit, compliance and security initiatives across the IBM i environment.
• Contribute to infrastructure transformation, datacentre and cloud integration programmes.

Essential skillsets & experience:

• Extensive experience administering and engineering IBM i (AS/400) environments.
• Strong knowledge of IBM Power Systems architecture and administration.
• Experience managing IBM i operating system upgrades, maintenance and lifecycle activities.
• Strong understanding of:
  • LPAR design and management
  • Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)
  • HMC administration
  • Performance management and tuning
  • Job scheduling and workload management
  • Backup and recovery services
  • High availability and disaster recovery architectures
  • Experience supporting business-critical IBM i applications and services.
  • Strong troubleshooting and root-cause analysis skills across operating system, infrastructure and application layers.
  • Experience supporting large-scale, highly available production environments.

  IBM Storage Requirements

  • Experience supporting IBM storage platforms used by IBM Power environments.
  • Understanding of:
    • IBM FlashSystem
    • IBM Storwize
    • SAN infrastructure
    • Fibre Channel technologies
    • Multipathing
    • Storage provisioning and performance optimisation
    • Replication and disaster recovery technologies
    • Ability to provide design guidance, operational support and troubleshooting for IBM storage infrastructure supporting IBM i workloads.
    • Work with specialist storage engineering teams and vendors to optimise platform performance and resilience.

Desirable Experience

• PowerHA.
• MIMIX or equivalent IBM i replication technologies.
• BRMS.
• IBM AIX administration.
• IBM Spectrum Protect.
• SAN switch technologies.
• Automation using Ansible, Python or PowerShell.
• Monitoring solutions such as IBM Navigator, Grafana, SolarWinds or equivalent.
• Public cloud integration and hybrid infrastructure architectures.
• Experience applying AI-assisted operational tooling for monitoring, troubleshooting and knowledge management.

Key Attributes

• Deep technical expertise in IBM i and Power Systems technologies.
• Strong design and architecture capability.
• Excellent troubleshooting and diagnostic skills.
• Security and resilience focused.
• Strong documentation and governance discipline.
• Automation-first mindset.
• Ability to lead technical standards and engineering best practices.
• Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills.

Success Measures

• Availability and resilience of IBM i services.
• Stability and performance of IBM Power infrastructure.
• Effective operation of backup, disaster recovery and high availability solutions.
• Security and compliance of IBM i platforms.
• Reduction in operational effort through automation and process improvement.
• Successful delivery of platform upgrades and infrastructure transformation initiatives.
• Quality of technical standards, documentation and operational governance.

This role provides an opportunity to own and modernise a critical IBM i platform estate, ensuring the continued delivery of secure, resilient and high-performing services while helping shape the future direction of IBM Power and storage infrastructure.