Principal Engineer

Job description / Role

Job purpose

At Emirates, we believe in connecting the world, to and through, our global hub in Dubai; and in constantly innovating to ensure our customers ‘fly better’. Emirates Group IT thrives on the dynamic nature of technology. Being pioneers in aviation innovation, were always at the forefront, pushing boundaries. Were on the lookout for exceptional IT professionals to fortify our position as leaders in the industry.

Embark on a journey with the world’s largest international airline and become a vital part of our cutting-edge information and technology team as a Principal Engineer - Mainframe.

Join our Digital Platforms and Employee Experience team as Senior Technical Engineer, driving cutting-edge network and telecom practices at a group level. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in designing, implementing, and optimizing our network and telecom strategies to enhance efficiency, scalability, and reliability across our technology landscape globally.

Your expertise will help us streamline operations, reduce time-to-market, enhance performance and resiliency, and continuously improve our technology and processes. If you are passionate about leveraging the latest network and telecom technologies and practices to drive innovation and excellence, we invite you to apply to play a crucial role in shaping the future of our technology initiatives at Emirates Group.

As a Principal Engineer – Mainframe, you will actively design, develop, implement, and support infrastructure solutions for the group in alignment with corporate business and IT strategies ensuring an appropriate balance between functional, service quality, and system management requirements. This necessitates engagement with internal and external stakeholders while taking full responsibility for the implemented solutions and operational availability of production infrastructure.

In the role you will:

• Develop IT solutions that meet customer requirements. Ensure that the design is robust, appropriate, and high-quality conforming to corporate standards and in line with the technology strategy. Own, manage, and maintain solution designs of complex or large projects, products, environments, or platforms.
• Provide expert technical consultancy and guidance within the technology domain and act as a lead technical expert in delivering infrastructure solutions.
• Contribute to the development and maintenance of architecture guiding principles, drawing on architectural knowledge and experience.
• Lead corporate IT standards, analysing and understanding the potential impact of competing technologies, assessing their strategic significance, defining their strategic role and scope, roadmap, and relationship to existing standards, and periodically reviewing our entire IT estate in the context of those standards.
• Track technology and business innovations, determine how they relate to our IT strategy, existing standards, platforms, and patterns, and lead the work to amend existing assets and/or create new assets to reflect changes in the technology landscape.
• Ensure implemented solutions meet the service level requirements in terms of expected availability, capacity, continuity, security, performance, and reliability. Identify and define standards and metrics on the relevant technology. Monitor current performance and ensure appropriate levels of capacity, quality, service level, and resources and solutions are optimally tuned.
• Publish and maintain high-quality documentation for the technology area. Work within the standard templates and documentation guidelines which includes detailed design, configuration details, support procedures, operations manuals, and architecture deployment.
• Manage end of life replacement of equipment and/or software within the technology domain to ensure conformance to technical standards and support the technology initiatives and directions. Ensure operational and information security risks are identified, tracked, and mitigated promptly.
• Lead solution and technical design review, ensuring that projects are following agreed corporate strategic direction and alignment to architectural standards and patterns.
• Provide expert advice to projects on technical and architectural standards, guiding them on the need to raise exception requests, develop new or amended standards, and on the appropriate use of architectural patterns.
• Manage, direct, inspire, and coach the work and capability of STE and operational resources as required and engage in, and lead a much wider virtual team consisting of at least 20 individuals.

Qualification

To be considered for this role, you must meet the below requirements:

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline. IBM Mainframe certifications are highly desirable.
• 10+ years of hands-on experience designing, engineering, administering, and supporting enterprise-scale IBM Mainframe environments, ideally within large, complex, and highly regulated organisations.
• Extensive experience serving as a senior technical lead, architect, or subject matter expert for Mainframe platforms, with responsibility for defining technology roadmaps, architecture standards, engineering best practices, and long-term platform strategy.
• Deep expertise across IBM Z Systems and z/OS technologies, including JES2/JES3, WLM, SMP/E, RACF, DFSMS/SMS, HCD, Parallel Sysplex, VSAM, IBM MQ, WebSphere, batch processing, scheduling, automation, and high-volume OLTP environments.
• Proven experience managing mission-critical Mainframe infrastructure, including platform availability, resilience, capacity planning, performance tuning, RMF/SMF analysis, workload optimisation, and complex root cause analysis.
• Strong background in Mainframe storage and I/O engineering, including IBM DS8000, DASD administration, allocating, sizing, resizing and managing volumes, DFSMS/SMS, Virtual Tape Systems, FlashCopy, Safeguarded Copy, storage replication technologies, capacity forecasting, and performance optimisation.
• Demonstrated experience designing and supporting Mainframe networking, middleware, and integration solutions, including TCP/IP, z/OS Communications Server, IBM MQ, WebSphere, secure communications, enterprise connectivity, hybrid cloud integration and understanding of SDN concepts.
• Proven track record leading Mainframe modernisation, transformation, and automation initiatives, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC), AIOps, intelligent monitoring, REXX scripting, IBM System Automation, and operational efficiency programmes.
• Extensive experience designing, implementing, and testing high-availability, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and business continuity solutions, including Parallel Sysplex, GDPS, Cyber Vaulting, immutable backups, ransomware recovery preparedness, and recovery testing against defined RTO and RPO objectives.
• Strong expertise in Mainframe security, governance, risk, and compliance, including RACF administration, privileged access management, encryption technologies, security monitoring, audit remediation, technical risk management, regulatory compliance, and the management of technical debt and platform lifecycle risks.
• Demonstrated ability to influence and engage senior stakeholders, executive leadership, technology partners, and cross-functional engineering teams, with experience mentoring engineers, driving technical excellence, and supporting strategic technology investment decisions.

Leadership role: Yes

Salary & benefits

Join us in a management role and enjoy an attractive tax-free salary. On top of our generous travel benefits, including discounted flights and hotel stays around the world, this managerial role also has an excellent leave and healthcare package. That’s on top of transport benefits, life insurance and more.

About the Company

A fast-growing international airline with one of the youngest fleets in the sky and more than 400 awards for excellence worldwide.