Head / Director Principal Engineer - IBM Z/OS

🔒 Confidential Employer
Posted 23 April 2026
LOCATION
Sheffield
TYPE
Contract
LEVEL
Mid-Senior level
CATEGORY
Technology
This employer holds a UK Home Office sponsor license — sponsorship for this specific role is at the employer’s discretion

SKILLS

z/OS OpenTelemetry Quantum-Safe Encryption DevOps Ansible Red Hat OpenShift Zowe IBM Z

FULL DESCRIPTION

Head / Director Principal Engineer - IBM Z/OS

​The Role: Head / Director Principal Engineer - IBM Z/OS

Location: Sheffield, UK

Position Type: Contract Inside IR35

Remote work option Available: Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite

​

Job Description:

Technical Expertise & Tooling Mastery

1. Core Platforms Engineering Depth

  • IBM Z: Deep-level expertise in z/OS, parallel sysplex, GDPS, WLM, CF structures, USS, and RMF/SMF performance analysis.
  • IBM I: Comprehensive mastery of IBM I objects, Integrated File System (IFS) and PowerHA clusters.

2. OpenTelemetry & Observability Stack

  • OTel Specification: Deep understanding of the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP), including the design and configuration of OTel Collectors (receivers, processors, and exporters).
  • Distributed Tracing: Experience with context propagation (W3C Trace Context) to link mainframe transactions to distributed microservices.
  • Backend Integration: Ability to export telemetry to industry-standard backends such as IBM Instana, Splunk, Dynatrace, Elastic, or Grafana/Prometheus.
  • Middleware Mastery: Hands-on experience with zCEE, CICS, DB2, and MQ. You should understand how to enable trace propagation across these subsystems using OTel-compatible headers.

3. Quantum-Safe Encryption & Modern Security

  • PQC (Post-Quantum Cryptography): Knowledge of implementing Quantum-Safe APIs and algorithms (like Crystals-Kyber) available on the IBM z16 and modern Power systems.
  • Pervasive Encryption: Expert-level ability to implement Dataset and File System encryption with zero impact on application logic.
  • Zero Trust Architecture: Architecting "Least Privilege" access systems and ensuring end-to-end encryption of data using AT-TLS or TLS 1.3.

4. Modern Tooling & Open Platform Integration

  • DevOps Orchestration: Mastery of GitHub (Actions/Enterprise), Jenkins, and Ansible for cross-platform CI/CD.
  • Automation Frameworks: Expert-level Ansible Automation Platform usage, including specialized IBM Z/I Collections for system automation.
  • Cloud-Native Stack: Expert knowledge of Red Hat OpenShift (OCP) and z/OS Container Extensions (zCX).
  • Modern DevEx: Experience of Zowe and VS Code to modernise the engineering interface.

​

If this position is of interest to you, apply now!

Sign up free — access 45,000+ UK sponsor-licensed jobs