Field CTO – Mainframe Modernization

Blitzy•Cambridge, MA

1d•$250,000 - $350,000

About The Position

Blitzy is seeking a Field CTO with deep mainframe expertise to help enterprises understand, transform, and continually evolve mission-critical mainframe software. The role combines senior mainframe architecture leadership with hands-on customer engagement and collaboration across engineering, product, partnerships, and sales. The Field CTO will help guide safe modernization that preserves business logic, data relationships, transaction processing, concurrency, recovery, and operational behavior while addressing the architectural constraints that make change difficult and expensive. The role also contributes to the evolution of Blitzy’s platform and its mainframe modernization offerings. The Field CTO will identify recurring modernization challenges and work with engineering to turn solutions into automated, reusable capabilities, including improvements to the platform’s World Model and approaches to validation. The position builds trusted relationships with customer and partner executives and technical leaders, helps define modernization architectures and delivery methods, and contributes to Blitzy’s technical vision and market leadership.

Requirements

Deep, hands-on knowledge of IBM Z and z/OS, including technologies such as CICS, Db2, IMS, JCL, VSAM, Parallel Sysplex, RACF, MQ, and batch scheduling, with particular depth in several of these areas.
Ability to reason about complex mainframe application behavior, data dependencies, transaction integrity, concurrency, recovery, and security—not simply COBOL syntax or hardware.
Strong understanding of modern distributed systems, cloud architectures, and enterprise modernization, including tradeoffs involved in translating mainframe behavior into modern environments.
Experience solving difficult technical problems in mission-critical enterprise systems and turning insights into practical modernization plans.
Ability to earn the confidence of experienced systems engineers and senior technology executives alike.
Passion for technology, customer outcomes, building better solutions, and learning about AI and autonomous software engineering.
Willingness to work hands-on with customer, partner, engineering, and product teams rather than acting solely as an external advisor.

Responsibilities

Serve as a senior technical authority on mainframe systems, application and data architectures, transaction processing, and operational resilience.
Lead architectural analysis of how application logic, data models, transaction boundaries, batch workloads, and runtime behavior interact across mainframe estates, preserving system-level correctness during modernization.
Work with customer architects to design target-state architectures that preserve business logic, concurrency, recovery, and operational guarantees.
Guide decisions about what to translate, rearchitect, or retain while minimizing migration risk and protecting operational continuity.
Partner with engineering, product, partnerships, and sales teams to improve how the platform discovers, transforms, and validates complex applications.
Identify recurring mainframe modernization challenges and work with engineering to develop automated, reusable platform capabilities that reduce reliance on specialized human intervention.
Help extend Blitzy’s World Model to represent relationships among business logic, application behavior, data, and runtime dependencies.
Develop reusable validation approaches, reference architectures, and scalable service offerings, and strengthen testing of functional equivalence, transactional integrity, and operational resilience.
Explore emerging AI and autonomous engineering approaches to make successive migrations easier.
Build trusted relationships with CIOs, CTOs, engineering leaders, and senior mainframe specialists, communicating at both architectural and executive levels.
Lead technical discovery, architecture reviews, workshops, proofs of concept, and technical validation for complex modernization opportunities.
Help customers develop pragmatic long-term visions that connect architecture choices with business outcomes, cost, risk, and strategic flexibility.
Work with Partnerships, Enterprise Sales, AI Solutions Consultants, and Customer Success to support customer decisions, adoption, and expansion.
Act as a senior technical counterpart to cloud providers, global systems integrators, and specialist modernization partners.
Build relationships with partner technical and delivery leaders; co-design joint solutions, reference architectures, validation frameworks, and repeatable delivery methods.
Support joint workshops and customer engagements and bring implementation insights into Blitzy’s product and service roadmap.
Help define Blitzy’s long-term technical vision for mainframe modernization and identify opportunities to change how complex enterprise systems are understood, transformed, and operated.
Contribute technical thought leadership through executive conversations, partner engagement, and selected industry forums.
Promote practical problem-solving, technical rigor, intellectual curiosity, and continuous learning.