Sr Engineer as400 Developer

Position: Principal Software Engineer – IBM i (AS/400) Connectivity

Location: Remote, United States

Level: Open from Software Engineer through Principal

Type: Direct hire (full time)

Overview Our client, an enterprise workload automation software company, is building a new connectivity agent that extends its automation platform natively onto IBM i (AS/400). This role joins a small, senior team building the capability largely from first principles, validating on live IBM i partitions and making architectural decisions where documentation is limited.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test and maintain native software for IBM i connectivity and integration
• Build native job submission/monitoring, spool file and message/data queue handling, and CL/RPG program invocation
• Integrate IBM i with the platform via native host server APIs and/or IBM Toolbox for Java (JTOpen/jt400)
• Implement security and per-user authorization using IBM i user profiles and authorities, extending existing identity/credential management
• Troubleshoot complex system-level issues across IBM i, Unix and Java
• Improve reliability, performance, security and scalability of the IBM i solution
• Participate in architecture, design reviews, code reviews, testing and release planning
• Use AI tools to accelerate development while verifying against authoritative IBM i references
• Document connector behavior and platform prerequisites for field and support teams

Required

• 10+ years professional software engineering with strong Java 8+
• Hands-on IBM i integration: CL, native job/spool/queue APIs, JTOpen/jt400, DB2 for i
• Working proficiency in C, including ILE C on IBM i
• Vendor host-server or RPC-style APIs over TCP/IP (connection lifecycle, error handling)
• Strong concurrency/multithreading; long-running monitors (job polling, spool/file event detection)
• Works from primary IBM i API references, not just tutorials or AI output
• Git, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes
• Production use of AI tools, with judgment to catch incorrect AI output on specialized IBM i APIs
• Architectural focus across APIs and connectors

Preferred

• Workload automation tools such as Tidal, CA-7, Control-M, Stonebranch or BMC
• IBM i clustering / high availability
• Advanced IBM i security (authorization lists, adopted authority)
• RPG/COBOL environments or IBM i modernization
• Mainframe or midrange migration projects