IBM MQ Administrator - z/OS (Mainframe)
DURATION: 6 months (Extension - very likely)
LOCATION: Edinburgh, Leeds or Manchester
WORKING HOURS: Standard business hours with out of hours support required
ONSITE REQUIREMENTS: Hybrid - 2 days onsite per week
ENGAGEMENT TYPE: Outside IR35
DAY RATE: £550 per day
LEGAL RIGHT TO WORK: Candidates must have the legal right to work in the UK. Sponsorship is not available for this role.
ATRIUM GLOBAL SUMMARY
Atrium Global is supporting a client within the financial services sector who is seeking a highly experienced IBM MQ z/OS Administrator to join a specialist mainframe middleware team.
JOB OVERVIEW
This role sits within a mainframe-only environment and requires a contractor who can contribute immediately with minimal ramp-up. You will provide hands-on support and delivery across a critical IBM MQ estate on z/OS, focusing on production stability, incident resolution and controlled change delivery.
This is a pure z/OS MQ role - candidates with primarily distributed MQ or broader platform backgrounds will not be suitable.
RESPONSIBILITIES
* Provide hands-on administration of IBM MQ on z/OS across production environments
* Deliver incident, problem and change resolution within strict SLAs
* Support and maintain MQ queue managers, channels and configurations
* Perform production deployments, upgrades and migrations
* Troubleshoot complex MQ issues across mission-critical systems
* Maintain service stability, resilience and performance optimisation
* Work closely with stakeholders across mainframe and infrastructure teams
* Ensure adherence to governance, processes and security standards
* Participate in out of hours support and deployment activities
REQUIREMENTS
* Strong hands-on experience administering IBM MQ on z/OS (v9.x preferred)
* Proven experience working in mainframe-only MQ environments
* Deep understanding of:
* Queue managers
* Channels
* MQ objects
* Clustering / Queue Sharing Groups (QSG)
* Experience with TLS / SSL configuration and MQ security (RACF)
* Strong troubleshooting skills within production MQ environments
* Experience delivering changes independently into production
* Familiarity with z/OS panels, ISPF and mainframe tooling
* Experience working within ITIL-controlled environments
NICE TO HAVE
* Experience with MQ monitoring tools on z/OS (e.g. Omegamon)
* Experience within UK banking or financial services environments
* Experience supporting high-volume payments or core banking systems