Mainframe DB2 Administrator-Remote
David Miller
Title: DB2 Administrator
Location: USA (Remote)
Duration: 6+ Months
Role Summary:
Client is seeking an experienced DB2 Administrator to support a large-scale development environment and drive performance tuning across pre-production and production landscapes. The role focuses on program walk-throughs (pre-release), environment integrity for development teams, and patching/monitoring to proactively prevent issues—freeing product teams to focus on higher-value initiatives. You will also establish support process governance (ticketing, L2 triage, SLAs) and enable a consistent, hybrid (on/off/near-shore) delivery model.
Key Responsibilities
Program Walk-Throughs & SDLC Readiness
Perform structured program walk-throughs prior to code change releases, scanning COBOL/DB2 components and SQL for efficiency, accuracy, and cost optimization.
Provide actionable feedback to development teams; validate binds to the correct schemas; review data integrity impacts.
Serve as a pre-prod gate to streamline SDLC processes and reduce regression risk.
Development Environment Support (L2)
Maintain integrity of multi-environment development landscapes (e.g., multiple schemas/environments).
Manage space and volume concerns; execute flash copies of production data to refresh development environments.
Monitor database utilities and control database objects; administer archiving and quarterly data purges per policy.
Establish and operate a formal ticketing process (e.g., ServiceNow) and L2 support foundation; participate in regular stand-ups.
Stand up a formal defect/issue tracking system and document runbooks/playbooks.
SQL Performance Monitoring & Tuning
Analyze traces and performance metrics; identify workloads exceeding CPU/utilization thresholds and remediate via query/index/parameter tuning.
Optimize monitoring (e.g., SolarWinds or equivalent): streamline alerting, reduce log fatigue, and implement proactive capacity/scalability measures.
Partner with infrastructure and security teams to ensure compliant, resilient operations.
Governance, Communication & Continuous Improvement
Define L2 SLAs/OLAs, escalation paths, and reporting; drive incident/problem/change best practices (ITIL).
Produce operational dashboards and improvement backlogs; present status and recommendations to stakeholders.
Coordinate effectively across on-shore/off-shore/near-shore teams to provide seamless hybrid support coverage.
Required Qualifications
7–10+ years of experience as a DBA/Database Engineer supporting DB2 (Mainframe/z/OS) in enterprise environments.
Strong knowledge of JCL, COBOL/DB2 packages, BIND/REBIND, RUNSTATS, reorgs, indexing strategies, partitioning, and query optimization.
Hands-on experience with performance tuning, patch management, backup/restore, and high-availability concepts.
Experience establishing support governance: ticketing workflows (e.g., ServiceNow), L2 triage, SLAs, documentation/runbooks.
Proficiency with monitoring tools (e.g., SolarWinds, Dynatrace, Splunk) and performance trace analysis.
Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and the ability to work across global delivery models.
Willingness to participate in maintenance windows and on-call rotations.
Preferred Qualifications
Exposure to Oracle and broader mainframe DBA concepts; scripting skills (Shell/PowerShell/Python).
ITIL v4 certification; IBM DB2 and/or Microsoft SQL Server certifications.
Experience in retail/CPG or similarly complex, high-throughput environments.