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

Location: Buffalo, New York, United States of America; hybrid with four days onsite and one day working from home each week

Salary: $97,100–$161,800 annual USD

Company

M&T Bank provides banking services and supports business-critical financial applications and infrastructure.

What you will do

• Lead the technical design, development, enhancement, modernization, and production support of IBM z/OS applications.
• Develop secure, efficient, maintainable, and resilient COBOL batch and online processing solutions, including troubleshooting and performance tuning.
• Review solution designs, requirements, code changes, peer reviews, deployment readiness, and production-readiness activities.
• Define testing for batch validation, automated regression and reconciliation, performance checks, implementation verification, and rollback readiness.
• Build and maintain Git-based CI/CD workflows with dependency-aware builds, static analysis, security gates, controlled promotion, and rollback support.
• Lead API enablement, modularization, distributed and cloud integration, incident root-cause analysis, resiliency improvements, and technical debt remediation.

Requirements

• Associate’s degree plus at least 5 years of systems analysis and/or application development experience; or bachelor’s degree plus at least 3 years; or, in lieu of a degree, at least 7 years of combined education and relevant work experience including at least 3 years of systems analysis and/or application development.
• Strong hands-on IBM z/OS application engineering experience with 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.
• Expert analytical and software engineering skills with a strong understanding of SDLC, testing, deployment, resiliency, security, and change management.
• Experience leading technical initiatives or engineering workstreams as an individual-contributor technical lead and reviewing solution designs, technical requirements, and code changes.

Nice to have

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science plus at least 5 years of systems analysis and/or application development experience.
• Experience with z/OS Connect, ZDIH, API design, and integration with distributed or cloud platforms.
• Experience with mainframe DevOps, test automation, IBM DBB/zBuilder, Test Accelerator for Z, SonarQube, Ansible, IDz, VS Code, Zowe, USS, and approved AI-assisted tools.
• Experience with Easytrieve+, CA7/Control-M, File-AID, Abend-AID, Xpediter, InterTest, or equivalent tools.
• Experience improving production stability, reducing defects, increasing engineering productivity, and influencing technical decisions in Agile delivery environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work model with four days in the office and one day working from home each week.
• Health, welfare, retirement benefits, and a 401(k) match of 5%.
• Banking Officers receive 25 days of paid time off and 12 paid holidays.
• 40 hours of paid volunteer time per year and work-life balance support.
• Work is governed by risk, regulatory, policy, change-management, security, data-protection, access-control, and audit requirements.