Principal Software Engineer - IBM i (AS/400) Connectivity

Redwood Software

23h

About The Position

As a Software Engineer – Principal, IBM i (AS/400) Connectivity, you will help build a new connectivity agent that extends Redwood RunMyJobs (RMJ) natively onto IBM i (AS/400), enabling Redwood to support some of the largest enterprise automation environments in the market. You will join a small, senior team building this capability largely from first principles, validating assumptions on live IBM i partitions and making architectural decisions where modern documentation may be limited. This position is open across levels from Software Engineer to Principal as we build out the team.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience with strong Java 8+ skills.
Hands-on IBM i (AS/400) integration experience, including CL, native job/spool/queue APIs, IBM Toolbox for Java (JTOpen/jt400), and DB2 for i.
Working proficiency in C, including ILE C on IBM i.
Experience integrating with vendor host-server or RPC-style APIs over TCP/IP, including connection lifecycle management and error handling.
Strong concurrency and multithreading skills, with experience building resilient, long-running monitoring components such as job polling and spool/file event detection.
Ability to work effectively from primary technical sources, including IBM i host-server and API references, rather than relying solely on tutorials or unverified AI-generated output.
Experience with modern DevOps practices and technologies, including Git, CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Fluency with AI tools in a production engineering environment.
Strong code judgment, including the ability to identify plausible but incorrect AI-generated recommendations involving specialized IBM i APIs.
Proficiency in prompting AI tools, combined with the judgment to recognize when a task is too specialized for AI-assisted approaches.
Ability to maintain an architectural focus, abstracting from individual API and connector details to shared platform-integration designs.

Nice To Haves

Experience with workload automation products such as Tidal, CA-7, Control-M, Stonebranch, BMC, or RunMyJobs preferred.
Experience with IBM i clustering or high-availability configurations preferred.
Familiarity with advanced IBM i security concepts, including authorization lists and adopted authority, preferred.
Background working with RPG/COBOL environments or IBM i modernization projects preferred.
Mainframe or midrange migration project experience preferred.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, test, and maintain native software supporting connectivity and integration with IBM i (AS/400) environments.
Build native job submission and monitoring, spool file and message/data queue handling, and CL/RPG program invocation capabilities.
Integrate IBM i functionality with the Redwood platform through clean, versioned extension points using native host server APIs and/or IBM Toolbox for Java (JTOpen/jt400).
Integrate security and per-user authorization using IBM i user profiles and authority concepts while extending Redwood’s existing identity and credential management capabilities.
Troubleshoot complex system-level issues across IBM i, Unix, and Java environments.
Improve the reliability, performance, security, and scalability of Redwood’s IBM i solutions.
Partner with product managers, architects, and engineers to translate customer requirements into effective technical solutions.
Participate in architecture discussions, design reviews, code reviews, testing, and release planning.
Leverage agentic AI to accelerate implementation, testing, and documentation while independently verifying correctness against authoritative IBM i references.
Document connector behavior and platform prerequisites for field and support teams.
Contribute to team success through clear communication, shared responsibility for quality, and accountable ownership of goals and delivery commitments in a fast-paced, iterative agile environment.