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

Redwood Software provides an orchestration platform for automating mission-critical business and IT processes across complex ERP, hybrid cloud, data, and AI environments. The Principal Software Engineer will build and maintain native IBM i connectivity for Redwood RunMyJobs, including job submission, monitoring, security, and integration capabilities. The role also involves troubleshooting system-level issues, improving reliability and scalability, collaborating on architecture and delivery, and documenting connector behavior.

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

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
• 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