Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME
6-Month contract - Inside IR35 - market rate
London based - will consider fully remote
Finance sector
We are looking for a senior Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME to support a short, focused assessment for a major UK financial services client.
This is not a general Mainframe systems-programming role. We need someone who can take incomplete production evidence, diagnose where scalability risk genuinely sits, and confidently lead technical conversations with experienced client architects, platform engineers and operations SMEs.
The assignment
The client operates a long-established pension administration platform on IBM Mainframe technology. The assessment is looking at how the platform will behave under future business growth and concentrated demand events, and what should be:
- moved away from the transactional core;
- monitored differently; or
- addressed through additional capacity.
The work includes a particular focus on Db2, CICS, Mainframe capacity, batch processing, workload attribution and observability.
There is also a historic question around a data-centre/IBM Z16 migration, increased TLS processing and an associated increase in general-purpose MSU consumption, which needs to be assessed from evidence rather than assumed causation.
Skills & Experience:
The ideal consultant will have strong hands‑on experience in the following areas.
Db2 for z/OS performance and scalability
Deep practical experience investigating:
- index design and access-path performance;
- RUNSTATS, REORG and statistics strategy;
- locking, timeouts and deadlocks;
- high-cost SQL and packages;
- data archival/lifecycle strategies;
- performance behaviour as database volumes grow.
We particularly want someone able to look at an established Db2 estate and determine whether there is accumulated performance or data‑management debt that should be remediated before simply adding infrastructure.
CICS performance
Strong understanding of:
- CICS-to-Db2 workload behaviour;
- transaction/program/package correlation;
- threadsafe execution and open TCBs;
- Db2 thread reuse/DB2ENTRY configuration;
- commit and syncpoint behaviour;
- transaction chattiness and excessive data retrieval;
- identifying where Legacy access patterns should be re-engineered rather than simply tuned.
Mainframe capacity and workload management
Experience with:
- WLM service policies and service classes;
- MSU utilisation and workload attribution;
- capping and group-capacity behaviour;
- SCRT/sub-capacity licensing considerations;
- separating CPU consumption from elapsed-time constraints;
- critical and non-critical batch;
- identifying concurrent workload peaks and genuine capacity headroom.
TLS/cryptography/IBM Z
Useful experience investigating performance changes associated with:
- IBM Z hardware migrations;
- TLS handshake versus encryption workload;
- zIIP versus general-purpose processing eligibility;
- validating pre/post-migration CPU or MSU changes.
The consultant should be comfortable challenging assumptions such as "TLS caused an additional 50 MSU" and establishing what evidence is needed to prove the actual cause and recoverable benefit.
Observability and diagnostics
We need somebody who can connect:
business event ? application/CICS transaction ? job or package ? Db2 object ? CPU/MSU/I/O/locking ? elapsed time
Experience with tools such as the following would be valuable:
- other Mainframe APM/telemetry platforms.
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