Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME

London (Hybrid) | 6-Month Rolling Contract | Inside IR35

We are supporting a major financial services organisation seeking a highly experienced Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME to undertake a strategic assessment of a large-scale IBM Mainframe environment supporting critical pension administration services.

This is a senior consulting engagement focused on identifying performance bottlenecks, scalability constraints and future growth risks across IBM Z infrastructure, z/OS, Db2 and CICS environments.

You will work closely with architecture, engineering and operations teams to assess current platform performance, analyse capacity trends and provide evidence-based recommendations to support future business growth.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct end-to-end performance and scalability assessments across IBM Mainframe platforms.
• Analyse workload behaviour across z/OS, CICS, Db2 and batch processing environments.
• Identify current and future capacity constraints, utilisation trends and performance risks.
• Investigate increases in CPU and MSU consumption, including impacts from IBM Z16 upgrades and infrastructure changes.
• Assess workload attribution, licensing implications and optimisation opportunities.
• Lead technical workshops and challenge assumptions through data-driven analysis.
• Produce clear recommendations and prioritised remediation roadmaps.

Essential Skills & Experience

• IBM Mainframe Performance Engineering
• z/OS Performance Analysis
• Db2 for z/OS Performance & Scalability
• CICS Performance Tuning
• RMF / SMF Analysis
• WLM Policy & Capacity Management
• MSU Consumption Analysis
• Capacity Planning & Forecasting
• Batch Workload Optimisation
• Application & Database Performance Troubleshooting

Desirable Experience

• IBM Z16 migrations or upgrades
• TLS, System SSL and cryptographic workload analysis
• CPACF, Crypto Express and ICSF
• zIIP utilisation and offload optimisation
• Observability and APM tooling including:
  • OMEGAMON
  • BMC MainView / AMI
  • Dynatrace
  • Datadog

Mainframe Performance & Scalability SME