Senior Mainframe Storage Administrator

About the Role :

We are seeking a highly skilled and seasoned Mainframe Storage Administrator to join our enterprise infrastructure team.

In this critical role, you will be responsible for the engineering, configuration, performance tuning, data migration, and 24/7 reliability of our enterprise z/OS storage environment across diverse business domains including retail banking, wealth management, global markets, and payments.

You will work closely with application development teams, database administrators, security officers, and third-party vendors to ensure seamless, high-performance data availability, robust backup/recovery capabilities, and disaster recovery readiness for mission-critical systems.

Key Responsibilities :

1. Architecture and Engineering :

- Design, implement, and maintain complex enterprise mainframe storage environments, managing DASD (including IBM DS8000/FlashSystem series), VTL (IBM TS7700 series), tape subsystems, automated storage tiering, and hierarchical storage management to meet rigorous enterprise availability (99.999%) and performance standards.

- Participate in capacity planning and disaster recovery (DR) strategy design, documentation, and testing.

2. DFSMS Administration and Policy Management:

- Expertly configure and maintain the Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem (DFSMS), including ACS (Automatic Class Selection) routines, Storage Groups, Data Classes, Management Classes, and Storage Classes to optimize space utilization and performance.

- Manage dataset allocation, volume selection, and SMS-managed space provisioning.

3. Performance Tuning and Diagnostics:

- Monitor storage subsystem performance using tools such as IBM OMEGAMON for Storage, IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC), CA-Disk, and Sysview.

- Analyze storage-related abends, intermittent I/O timeouts, IO bottlenecks, space shortages, ENQ/DEQ contention on storage volumes, and device allocation errors, performing deep-dive troubleshooting to resolve issues swiftly.

4. Security and Compliance:

- Ensure all storage configurations and data-at-rest protection comply with strict financial regulatory standards and corporate security policies, collaborating with security administrators for robust data encryption, RACF/ACF2 resource protection, and secure data disposal.

- Manage storage encryption (disk and tape), RACF security controls for datasets, and GDPR/regulatory data retention requirements.

5. Backup, Recovery, and Disaster Recovery:

- Manage enterprise backup, archiving, and recovery operations using DFSMShsm (including migration policy management and HSM tuning), DFSMSdss, and leading copy services (such as FlashCopy, PPRC/Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, and z/OS Global Mirror (XRC)) including consistency groups and multi-target replication strategies.

- Plan and execute regular disaster recovery testing, backup validation, and data restoration drills with minimal disruption to production workloads.

- Manage offsite vaulting and cyber-resiliency (immutable) backup strategies.

6. Storage Provisioning and Optimization:

- Provision storage resources for new applications and capacity expansions.

- Perform regular volume balancing, defragmentation, and performance optimization.

- Manage FBA (Fixed-Block Architecture) and CKD (Count-Key-Data) device types as required.

7. L3 Support and Mentorship:

- Act as the ultimate escalation point (Level 3) for major storage-related incident management, providing root-cause analysis (RCA) and sharing domain knowledge with junior systems programmers and operations teams.

- Foster a collaborative, inclusive team culture and actively mentor team members to build technical depth across the group.

8. Stakeholder and Vendor Coordination:

- Liaise with application development teams, business stakeholders, and hardware/software vendors (e.g., IBM, Dell, or Hitachi storage partners) to coordinate hardware upgrades, microcode updates, and complex change implementations.

9. Modernization and Automation:

- Contribute to the roadmap for modernizing storage operations, including z/OSMF, cloud storage integration (e.g., S3-compatible object storage), and adoption of Ansible/Puppet for storage automation.

Qualifications and Technical Competencies:

Experience :

- Minimum of 8-10+ years of hands-on experience in IBM Mainframe systems programming and storage administration, with a deep, specialized focus on DFSMS, DASD, and tape management in a large-scale enterprise environment. Financial services experience is preferred.

Core Technical Skills :

1. Expert-level knowledge of DFSMS, DFSMSdfp, DFSMShsm, DFSMSdss, and DFSMSrmm (or third-party equivalents like CA-TLMS or CA-Dynam).

2. Strong proficiency in z/OS operating system commands, JCL, SMP/E, IOCDS/HCD (Hardware Configuration Definition), z/OSMF, and storage hardware configuration.

3. Proven track record in managing hardware copy services (FlashCopy, PPRC/XRC, remote replication) and disaster recovery topologies, including consistency groups and multi-target replication strategies.

4. Deep familiarity with enterprise hardware architectures (e.g., IBM DS8000 series, IBM FlashSystem, IBM TS7700 VTL, and Dell/EMC or Hitachi storage arrays).

5. Hands-on experience with storage monitoring and diagnostic tools such as IBM OMEGAMON for Storage, IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center (TPC), Sysview, CA-Disk, and FDR/ABR.

6. Experience with large-scale data migrations, hardware refreshes, and capacity planning, including migration using DFSMSdss DUMP/RESTORE and volume-level replication (VMR).

7. Working knowledge of DevOps toolchains (GitHub, Jenkins) and Agile practices (Scrum, JIRA, Confluence) is preferred.

8. Experience with storage encryption (disk and tape), RACF security controls for datasets, and GDPR/PDPO/regulatory data retention requirements.

Soft Skills :

1. Exceptional problem-solving and analytical capabilities under high-pressure incident scenarios.

2. Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate technical risks clearly to senior stakeholders and business sponsors.

3. Proven ability to coordinate across cross-functional teams, including application developers, DBAs, security, and external hardware vendors.

4. Proactive mindset, identifying systemic capacity or performance issues before they impact production workloads.

5. Commitment to fostering an inclusive, knowledge-sharing team culture and mentoring junior engineers.

Skills

Mainframe, Storage Administration, z/OS, IT Operations, TIVOLI, JCL, EMC, Dell Compellent Storage