Mainframe Engineer

Mainframe Engineer

Strategic Staffing Solutions is currently looking for a Mainframe Engineer for a W2 contract opportunity with one of our largest clients!

This is a W2 contract opportunity, and the candidates should be willing to work on our W2 ONLY, NO C2C.

Mainframe COBOL Engineer Location: Minneapolis, MN Role: W2 contract Duration: 12 months

Top Skills

• Strong COBOL development experience in a mainframe environment (most critical skill)
• Understand and have worked with VSAM extensively.
• Experience maintaining and enhancing legacy, highly customized mainframe applications
• Solid understanding of JCL (for batch processing)
• Experience working in an Agile environment

Experience

• Banking/Financial services experience will be very key for this role
• Specific experience and understanding of how account numbers, check numbers, routing, etc. break down, interact, and break down inside Cobol)
• Understanding of how those items track and interact internally
• Deposit tracking, fraud, etc. in finance experience is also nice

Project Summary

This contractor will have the opportunity to join a long-standing Mainframe engineering team supporting critical Data Distributor Deposits application. The environment is maintenance heavy and stability focused, with engineers responsible for modifying existing COBOL applications based on product requirements, testing changes, and deploying them into production. This is not greenfield development; success in this role comes from strong MF Cobol / VSAM knowledge, careful change management, and the ability to work within decades old systems.

• Support and maintain the Data Distributor, NOVA and SD applications in the Core Deposits team in MN.
• Modify existing COBOL programs to meet product and business requirements (enhancements, fixes, regulatory updates)
• Validate and distribute data to Hogan IDS, including nightly batch processing.
• Develop and maintain JCL for batch jobs and production workflows.
• Perform testing, validation, and production deployments following the company's change processes.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies and collaborate with product partners.
• Support production issues and contribute to application stability.
• Mentor and help train junior engineers on Hogan and mainframe best practices.

Soft Skills

• Strong communication skills and ability to work with product and business stakeholders.
• Ability and willingness to mentor junior engineers

Nice To Have

• ServiceNow experience for incident, change, or problem management
• Experience supporting batch-heavy overnight processing.
• Background: working in financial services or regulated environments.
• Prior experience on long-lived, business-critical systems with complex integrations.

Beware of scams. S3 never asks for money during its onboarding process.