Job Description
Title: DB2 Administrator
Location: Remote
Type: Contract
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.
Job Tags
Contract work, Remote work,