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

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

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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