Mainframe Storage Engineer

Company Overview

At 4A Consulting, we turn complexity into opportunity. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Baltimore, MD, we are a women-owned, boutique consulting firm specializing in delivering innovative, data-driven solutions to both the Federal Government and Fortune 500 clients. Our team blends deep industry knowledge with advanced technologies to design tailored strategies that drive measurable and sustainable outcomes. We pride ourselves on an agile, collaborative approach that helps organizations navigate challenges and seize emerging opportunities in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. At 4A, we don’t just deliver projects, we build trusted partnerships that empower our clients to lead with confidence in the digital age.

Position Overview

We are seeking a Mainframe Storage Engineer to support the Social Security Administration (SSA) in engineering, managing, and enhancing its enterprise mainframe storage infrastructure. This role ensures high availability, data protection, and business resilience across large-scale DASD, virtual tape, and object storage environments exceeding 80 petabytes. The engineer will design, maintain, and improve storage subsystems, replication architectures, disaster recovery processes, and automation supporting mission critical SSA systems operating 24x7. The selected candidate will be part of the team that provides support to the Agency\'s Tape Management System, Virtual Tape Control System, and Data Storage resources for SSA\'s production and test environments. The highly complex and demanding workload, ensuring data availability 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, requires intense, continuous support from SSA\'s storage management component.

Key Responsibilities

• Enhance mainframe storage infrastructure to meet SSA mission critical performance and availability objectives.
• Engineer and maintain business resilience processes (replication, snapshots, ABARS, HSM, and virtual tape).
• Manage SMS constructs, ACS routines, storage classes, management classes, and ISMF based configuration.
• Support requests related to provisioning, backup/recovery, dataset utilities, JCL, ISPF, and catalog services.
• Design and implement storage architectures, automated tiering, virtualized pools, and SRDF/GDDR.
• Conduct disaster recovery engineering, scripting, planning, and execution including RPO/RTO compliance.
• Create documentation, project plans, scripts, test models, and monthly activity reports in MS Office.
• Analyze, troubleshoot, and resolve backup, replication, storage performance, and capacity issues.
• Manage and support the Agency\'s Tape Management and Virtual Tape Control Systems.
• Engineer and maintain business resilience processes (replication, snapshots, ABARS, HSM, and virtual tape).
• Monitor storage environment to ensure that storage workloads are performing as designed and planned.
• Ability to produce operational documentation using industry best practices in technical writing.
• Ability to gather process requirements to automate into Ansible playbooks.
• Expertise in the Linux command-line environment.
• Provide disaster recovery exercise support through their vaulting operations and tape & encryption processes.
• Use of IBM\'s Job Control Language (JCL), IBM\'s dataset utilities, IBM\'s Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF), and IBM\'s Access Method Services (IDCAMS) tools to manage datasets.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree 7 years’ experience.
• 7 years supporting IBM z/OS mainframe storage systems including SMS, HSM, ABARS, and ISMF.
• 5 years with Oracle VSMc (VSM console), VSM, VLE and ZFS Virtual tape Libraries.
• 4 years with CA-1 Tape Management System (TMS) & CA Vantage and IBM Job Control Language (JCL).
• 3 years of experience designing and building Storage Management System (SMS).
• 2 years of experience using DataDomain Management Center (DDMC).
• Experience with Dell PowerMax DASD, DLm virtual tape, PowerScale, ECS, and associated control software.
• Hands on experience with JCL, IDCAMS, ISPF, dataset utilities, volume and catalog management.
• Experience with BMC Mainview SRM, StopX37, Rocket BRM, TREX, and related toolsets.
• Experience with z/OS access methods including VSAM, BSAM, QSAM, BPAM, and OAM.
• Deep expertise in storage engineering including performance, capacity planning, replication, and DR.
• Design, test, and deploy mainframe storage infrastructure (DASD, tape, ECS, and replication).
• Experience implementing automation scripts for reporting, alerts, analysis, and storage management.
• Experience working with ServiceNow change/incident processes in enterprise environments.
• Experience with Dell EMC DLm8500 systems, Data Domain and using Time Sharing Option.
• Knowledge of FICON, TCP/IP, and mainframe connectivity models.
• Strong documentation and customer support skills.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting federal agency mainframe environments.
• Experience designing long term storage transformation architectures.
• Experience supporting cyber resilience, electronic vaulting, and disaster recovery exercises.
• Experience growing, maintaining, monitoring and engineering problem resolutions on virtual tape architecture.
• Experience designing, installing, configuring, provisioning, and deploying storage hardware used in a multi-node storage architecture.
• Experience developing best practice project plans, engineering scripts, and documentation needed to migrate workloads to virtual tape.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively with cross functional technical teams.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Employer sponsorship is not available for this position.

Why Join 4A

• Be part of a mission-driven, women-owned consulting firm with a reputation for excellence.
• Work on high-impact projects across federal and commercial clients.
• Collaborate in an inclusive, growth-oriented culture where innovation is valued.
• Access career development programs, mentorship, and learning opportunities.
• Enjoy a comprehensive benefits package, flexible work options, and a focus on work-life balance.

Equal Opportunity Statement

4A Consulting is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to an inclusive hiring process. Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability may contact accommodations@4a-consulting.com. This email is intended solely for accommodation requests.

Please note that 4A Consulting participates in the federal E-Verify program. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the US. 4A Consulting will only use E-Verify once you have accepted a job offer and completed the Form I-9.