Lead IBM i Applications Manager

THE OPPORTUNITY

We're adding a role to our technology team — someone to own that application as a portfolio rather than a queue. Decide what gets built and in what order, run the projects, and stay close enough to the code to do the work and judge it.

You'd join our existing applications developer, so you won't be learning thirty years of accumulated system knowledge from scratch or on your own.

3 things to know before you read further

First: this is a lead role, not just a development seat. About a third of it is project leadership — taking requests from across the business, scoping them, sequencing them against each other, running them to delivery, and telling people honestly what they're getting and when. Right now that work isn't happening in any organized way. Requests arrive and get handled in the order they arrive. We're hiring someone to change that.

Second: this is not a migration job. We are not hiring someone to keep the lights on until a replacement system arrives. There is no migration project. This application is the operational core of the company, it's staying, and the work is to make it better. If you've spent the last few years being told your platform is on borrowed time, that isn't the conversation here.

Third: part of it is support, and that part is real. Roughly a third of the job is being the person the operation calls when the system won't do what somebody needs — a PO line that has to come off, an order stuck between two files, a customer asking why a shipment shows the way it does. You'll be talking to Order Entry, Production Control, and Shipping regularly, and sometimes to our customers' buyers directly.

Some people love that. It's the fastest way to actually understand a manufacturing business, and you're visibly useful every single day. Some people want to be left alone with their editor. We'd rather you know which one you are now.

REPORTING STRUCTURE

Reports to the VP of Operations and will operate between both plants in South Elgin, IL and Genoa, IL.

First 18 month immediate priorities

• The project portfolio. What gets built, in what order, on what timeline, and whether it actually landed. You'll set that with the VP of Operations and the department managers, and then you'll run it.
• The application itself. RPG and CL across the full order-to-ship process. Reading it, changing it, extending it — and increasingly, documenting it.
• The database side. DDS physical and logical files, display and printer files, and SQL against DB2 for i.
• Outside partners. We use an outside firm for BI and data work. You'd direct that relationship on the application side, along with any contract development we take on.
• Customer integrations. Electronic order interfaces with several of our largest customers, and the exceptions they throw.
• Production support. Escalation point for the transaction and data issues that can't be fixed from a screen. Careful surgery on a live system that two plants are running on.
• T he handoff downstream. Our IBM i data feeds a SQL Server reporting environment behind Power BI. You don't own that pipeline, but what you change upstream lands there.

REQUIREMENTS

• Real project leadership. You've run application projects end to end — figured out what was actually being asked for, scoped it, sequenced it, delivered it, and owned it when it slipped. Not "participated in projects." Ran them.
• 5+ years of hands-on RPG development on the IBM i / AS-400 , in production. This is a floor, not a formality — you can't lead this work without being able to open a thirty-year-old program and form a judgment about it.
• Experience owning a custom, in-house application with no vendor behind it. Code somebody else wrote, sparse documentation, and no support line to call.
• CL, DDS, display and printer files.
• SQL against DB2 for i , including embedded SQL.
• Comfort working directly with business users and managers. You can sit with a production scheduler, work out what they actually need, and tell a department head "not this quarter" without it becoming a problem.
• Onsite in South Elgin, 1st shift, with occasional trips to Genoa.
• Willingness to take the occasional off-hours call for month-end or a production-down issue.

A note on platform: IBM i and mainframe are different worlds. If your background is z/OS — COBOL, JCL, CICS — we appreciate the depth, but it isn't what this role needs.

Nice to have

• Manufacturing ERP work — order entry, routing, inventory, shipping
• Managing outside vendors or consulting partners
• ILE RPG, free-format, service programs
• Customer EDI or file-based order integrations
• Experience modernizing a legacy system incrementally, without a big-bang rewrite
• Having written a roadmap somebody actually funded
• SQL Server, Power BI, or Microsoft Fabric familiarity
• Formal PM training or a PMP — genuinely nice to have, genuinely not required
• IBM i change-management tooling (we don't have any — tell us what we're missing)