Mainframe Developer
IBM MQ Administrator - z/OS (Mainframe)
DURATION: 6 months (Extension - very likely)
LOCATION: Remote - or 2 days onsite at Edinburgh/ Leeds or Manchester
WORKING HOURS: Standard business hours with out of hours support required
ONSITE REQUIREMENTS: Hybrid but can offered as Remote - Must be UK Based
ENGAGEMENT TYPE: Outside IR35
DAY RATE: Market rates (Competitive)
LEGAL RIGHT TO WORK: Candidates must have the legal right to work in the UK. Sponsorship is not available for this role.
ATRIUM GLOBAL SUMMARY
Atrium Global is supporting a client within the financial services sector who is seeking a highly experienced IBM MQ z/OS Administrator to join a specialist mainframe middleware team.
JOB OVERVIEW
This role sits within a mainframe-only environment and requires a contractor who can contribute immediately with minimal ramp-up. You will provide hands-on support and delivery across a critical IBM MQ estate on z/OS, focusing on production stability, incident resolution and controlled change delivery.
This is a pure z/OS MQ role - candidates with primarily distributed MQ or broader platform backgrounds will not be suitable.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Provide hands-on administration of IBM MQ on z/OS across production environments
- Deliver incident, problem and change resolution within strict SLAs
- Support and maintain MQ queue managers, channels and configurations
- Perform production deployments, upgrades and migrations
- Troubleshoot complex MQ issues across mission-critical systems
- Maintain service stability, resilience and performance optimisation
- Work closely with stakeholders across mainframe and infrastructure teams
- Ensure adherence to governance, processes and security standards
- Participate in out of hours support and deployment activities
REQUIREMENTS
- Strong hands-on experience administering IBM MQ on z/OS (v9.x preferred)
- Proven experience working in mainframe-only MQ environments
- Deep understanding of:
- Queue managers
- Channels
- MQ objects
- Clustering / Queue Sharing Groups (QSG)
- Experience with TLS / SSL configuration and MQ security (RACF)
- Strong troubleshooting skills within production MQ environments
- Experience delivering changes independently into production
- Familiarity with z/OS panels, ISPF and mainframe tooling
- Experience working within ITIL-controlled environments
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience with MQ monitoring tools on z/OS (e.g. Omegamon)
- Experience within UK banking or financial services environments
- Experience supporting high-volume payments or core banking systems