Director, Mainframe Innovation Engineering

As a seasoned leader with deep expertise in the IBM Z platform, you are passionate about driving innovation and operational excellence in mainframe technology. Your leadership amplifies your technical acumen, enabling you to guide and inspire multiple engineering teams while remaining a hands-on practitioner who actively designs, builds, and reviews engineering solutions engaged with the evolution of mainframe solutions that power mission-critical enterprise operations. 

This role is focused on product engineering and platform capability development, not on day-to-day operational service delivery, SLA ownership, or incident management. 

In this director role, you will be accountable for shaping and executing the strategy to deliver foundational, productized mainframe solutions that enable scale and differentiation for our operations and digital teams. You will oversee the development of critical APIs, developer tools, and data-driven insights that are essential to our clients’ success, with success measured by adoption, reuse, and impact across multiple customers rather than operational efficiency metrics alone, while ensuring the creation of intellectual property that strengthens our position as a leading managed services provider. 

You will collaborate closely with Product Management, business stakeholders, Operations, and external partners to align engineering execution with the overall product vision, roadmap, and business priorities. Reporting directly to the SVP of Products, you will provide architectural leadership, drive technology selection, and ensure the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and maintainable solutions that are operationally ready for handoff to service delivery teams but not owned by this role in steady-state operations. 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Provide strategic direction and inspiration for multiple engineering teams developing mainframe-centric solutions that leverage both legacy and modern infrastructure, integrating with non-mainframe technologies as needed, while personally remaining involved in key design decisions, code reviews, and architectural implementation. 

• Stay at the forefront of mainframe and connected technology trends, identifying opportunities for innovation, optimization, and competitive differentiation that result in new or enhanced productized capabilities rather than purely operational improvements. 

• Deliver architectural thought leadership, guiding the evaluation and adoption of technologies and approaches that support the product roadmap and deliver exceptional client experiences, including hands-on leadership in building APIs, automation frameworks, developer tooling, and telemetry pipelines. 

• Ensure the timely delivery of robust, scalable solutions that meet product requirements, customer needs, and release commitments, with clear definitions of “done” that include documentation, support models, and readiness for operational consumption. 

• Lead all aspects of engineering team management, including hiring, training, mentoring, and performance evaluation, fostering a high-performance culture that values engineering craftsmanship, experimentation, and product thinking. 

• Establish and enforce best practices, standards, and policies for development, testing, deployment, and lifecycle management, distinct from operational runbooks and service management procedures. 

• Communicate effectively with executive leadership, peers, and clients regarding initiatives, risks, and solutions, ensuring transparency and alignment around product direction, engineering trade-offs, and roadmap progress rather than operational reporting. 

Qualifications: 

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. 

• Minimum 18 years of experience in mainframe systems programming, with at least 10 years in a senior managerial or leadership capacity, including recent experience (within the last 5–7 years) directly leading hands-on engineering efforts. 

• Expert knowledge of mainframe architectures, technologies, and scripting frameworks (Python, JSON, REXX), with demonstrated personal contribution or close technical oversight of code and engineering artifacts. 

• Strong understanding of mainframe telemetry (SMF, SCRT, IBM zSAM, logs) and integration patterns (REST APIs, SQL, XML), used to build reusable data products and insights rather than solely for operational monitoring. 

• Exceptional communication, critical thinking, collaboration, and analytical skills. 

• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects and deadlines in a dynamic environment. 

• Proven track record of delivering mainframe and digital platform features at scale across multiple clients, where success was defined by adoption and reuse of engineered capabilities, not by operational service delivery metrics. 

• Hands-on experience or certifications with technologies such as Snowflake, S3, containers, and Ansible are a plus. 

We are an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to caste, colour, creed, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, HIV status, or any other status protected by law. Candidates with disabilities who require accommodations during the recruitment process are encouraged to contact our Talent Acquisition team to place a request.