Senior Mainframe COBOL Developer — Olympia, WA (State of Washington)

Washington State Office of Financial Management (OFM)
Olympia, WA (Thurston County) Full-time Aug 2, 2026 COBOLmainframez/OSCICSJCLDB2VSAMWashington state governmentOlympia WAlegacy systemsstate government IT
$120,492–$131,436/yearper year

About the role

Washington State's Office of Financial Management is hiring a senior mainframe developer to keep two statewide financial systems running: the Agency Financial Reporting System (AFRS) and the Capital Asset Management System (CAMS). You'd own COBOL, CICS, and JCL work in an IBM z/OS shop, balancing new development with the kind of legacy-code detective work that keeps a state's books closing on time. It's a hybrid role based in Olympia, open to any Washington resident, with a standby rotation for production issues.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, test, and support enterprise mainframe accounting applications written in COBOL, CICS, and JCL for AFRS and CAMS, the state's core financial reporting and asset management systems
  • Develop and maintain both batch and online COBOL/CICS programs in an IBM z/OS environment
  • Write and modify JCL for batch processing, manage datasets, and coordinate job scheduling
  • Work with DB2 for z/OS and VSAM file structures (KSDS, ESDS, RRDS) that hold core financial data
  • Run unit, integration, and regression testing, and resolve defects surfaced in QA
  • Provide level 2/3 production support, including root-cause analysis and performance tuning of legacy code
  • Take part in an after-hours standby rotation to respond to incidents on mission-critical statewide financial systems
  • Mentor other developers and help enforce coding and documentation standards on the team

Requirements

  • Recent hands-on experience developing in a mainframe environment using COBOL, JCL, CICS, VSAM, and IBM z/OS
  • Proven ability to debug and performance-tune COBOL programs and work confidently in legacy code
  • Strong JCL authoring and modification skills, plus solid batch job and dataset management experience
  • Working knowledge of CICS online transaction development and VSAM file handling
  • Willingness to independently cover after-hours standby support for production systems
  • Strong analytical, documentation, and communication skills
  • Must reside in Washington State and pass a criminal background check
  • Preferred: a computer science or related degree, prior Washington State mainframe experience, familiarity with AFRS, DB2 for z/OS, and exposure to modern stacks such as .NET, C#, Angular, SQL, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript

What we offer

  • Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance
  • 12 paid holidays plus a minimum of 14 vacation days and 12 sick days per year
  • State pension (PERS) with an optional deferred compensation program
  • Employee Assistance Program and dependent care assistance
  • Parental leave, FMLA, and leave-sharing options
$120,492–$131,436/year per year Apply now