Senior Software Engineer – Mainframe COBOL, z/OS, CICS, JCL

Location: Buffalo, NY

This role is four days onsite, with the flexibility to work from home one day per week M&T Work Model - 4 Days In-Office | 1 Day Work From Home

Overview

Senior-level owner of design, development, modernization, and production support for business-critical IBM z/OS applications. Individual-contributor technical leader combining deep COBOL batch and online expertise with modern Git-based engineering, test automation, and CI/CD.

Primary Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Engineering Delivery

Lead technical design, development, enhancement, and support of mainframe applications, owning technical decisions and delivery quality for assigned domains under SDLC governance.

Partner with business and technology stakeholders to align delivery with priorities, requirements, risk controls, and enterprise standards.

Software Engineering Excellence

Deliver secure, efficient, maintainable, and resilient mainframe code; lead design, troubleshooting, and performance tuning across batch and online processing.

Establish coding standards and quality expectations for maintainability, performance, security, and resiliency.

SDLC, DevOps & Quality Engineering

• Review and approve solution designs, code changes, peer reviews, and deployment readiness.
• Define test strategy for mainframe changes, covering batch validation, automated regression and reconciliation testing, performance checks, and implementation verification.
• Build and maintain Git-based CI/CD workflows with dependency-aware builds, static analysis and security quality gates, controlled promotion, and rollback readiness to improve productivity and reduce manual effort.

Technical Requirements & Solution Design

Ensure requirements, solution designs, and implementation plans are complete, feasible, scalable, secure, and aligned with standards.

Guide architecture, integration patterns, and modernization across mainframe and connected platforms, translating mainframe constraints into business, delivery, risk, and operational impacts.

Operational Excellence & Modernization

• Lead incremental modernization through API enablement (e.g., z/OS Connect), modularization, and secure integration with distributed and cloud platforms while preserving transactional integrity.
• Own technical health by improving resiliency, reducing defects and technical debt, and guiding remediation plans.
• Ensure production readiness for batch schedules, online transactions, restart/recovery, monitoring, and support documentation; lead incident root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
• Apply AI-assisted engineering and automation responsibly where appropriate.

Communication & Collaboration

• Communicate architecture, decisions, progress, and risks clearly to technical and business stakeholders.
• Influence technical decisions across teams without direct authority, presenting in architecture reviews and knowledge-sharing forums.
• Maintain documentation and partner across business, architecture, infrastructure, security, operations, risk, and audit teams.
• Ensure changes comply with risk, regulatory, policy, change management, security, data protection, and access control standards, with auditable evidence; escalate risks and address audit and regulatory items on time.
• Support a culture of belonging, reflect the M&T Bank brand, maintain internal controls, and complete other assigned duties.
• Scope of Responsibilities
• Serve as an individual-contributor technical lead accountable for technical direction, design quality, code review, modernization, and production stability; no direct people management.
• Own technical outcomes for assigned applications, platforms, or domains, including design, delivery quality, operational readiness, and risk remediation, influencing engineers, architects, and partners through expertise and standards.

Education & Experience Required

Associate’s degree and a minimum of 5 years’ systems analysis and/ or application development work experience or Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 3 years’ systems analysis and/ or application development work experience. In lieu of degree, a combined minimum of 7 years’ education and/or relevant work experience, including a minimum of 3 years’ systems analysis and/or application development work experience.

Required Technical Skills

• Strong hands-on experience with IBM z/OS application engineering using COBOL, JCL, CICS, VSAM, and batch and online transaction processing.
• Experience diagnosing abends, data, transaction, and performance issues using z/OS debugging, file-analysis, and JES/SDSF tools.
• Experience with Git-based source control, peer review, and CI/CD for enterprise applications.
• Working knowledge of mainframe security, access control, auditability, change management, and resiliency.
• Experience integrating mainframe applications through MQ, APIs, files, or events.

Required Leadership & Delivery Experience

• Expert analytical and software engineering skills, with strong understanding of SDLC, testing, deployment, resiliency, security, and change management.
• Experience leading technical initiatives or engineering workstreams as an individual-contributor technical lead.
• Experience reviewing solution designs, technical requirements, and code changes.

Education & Experience Preferred

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a minimum of 5 years of systems analysis and/or application development experience.

Preferred Technical Skills

• z/OS Connect, ZDIH, API design, and integration with distributed or cloud platforms in support of modernization and platform resiliency.
• Mainframe DevOps and test automation (e.g., IBM DBB/zBuilder, Test Accelerator for Z, SonarQube, Ansible) and modern IDE workflows (IDz, VS Code, Zowe, USS); responsible use of approved AI-assisted tools.
• Easytrieve+, CA7/Control-M, File-AID, Abend-AID, Xpediter, InterTest, or equivalent tools.

Preferred Delivery & Collaboration Experience

Experience improving production stability, defect reduction, and engineering productivity.

Experience influencing technical decisions and presenting to technology and business stakeholders in Agile delivery environments.

We support our team members with generous benefits.

Competitive compensation

Health, welfare, and retirement benefits

401(k) match at 5%

Work-life balance and flexible work arrangements

Banking Officers start with 25 days PTO plus 12 paid holidays

40 hours paid volunteer hours per year

Much more. For details, see: M&T Benefits Overview

#Mainframe #zOS #COBOL #CICS #JCL #VSAM #SeniorSoftwareEngineer #SoftwareEngineering #DevOps #CICD #Modernization #APIs #ZOSConnect #MandTBank #Hiring #NowHiring #TechJobs #TechnicalLead

M&T Bank is committed to fair, competitive, and market-informed pay for our employees. The pay range for this position is $97,100.00 - $161,800.00 Annual (USD). The successful candidate’s particular combination of knowledge, skills, and experience will inform their specific compensation.

Location

Buffalo, New York, United States of America