Senior COBOL Developer - Legacy Modernization

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For more information visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com . The Senior COBOL Developer is the team's legacy-code authority. This is a discovery-first role: you will spend much of your time reading COBOL programs, JCL, copybooks, and job definitions to establish what the system actually does today, which of it still matters, and what must be preserved when it is replaced.

You will do that work with AI tooling (GitHub Copilot agents purpose-built for COBOL program analysis, job-flow mapping, and dependency tracing), using it to move fast and using your own expertise to verify what it produces. Discovery is only half of the job. You will also be actively retiring technical debt : identifying programs, jobs, reports, and interfaces that are no longer needed, building the evidence to prove it, and safely removing them from production.

And as legacy processes are replaced by their modernized equivalents, you will document what they did, confirm nothing still depends on them, and retire them. Alongside the modernization work, you will carry a share of production maintenance and support for the existing system: incident diagnosis, bug fixes, small enhancements, and periodic on-call coverage.

This keeps the modernization effort grounded in how the system really behaves in production.

Key Responsibilities

Legacy discovery and analysis Analyze legacy programs, jobs, and data flows. Read COBOL source, copybooks, JCL/PROCs, and Auto. Sys job definitions to document inputs, outputs, database access, business rules, and cross-system dependencies for programs and job boxes targeted by the program. Separate business rules from implementation history.

Distinguish behavior the business genuinely depends on from artifacts of how the code was written decades ago, and write it down in a form the Business Analyst, .NET Developer, and QA Engineer can act on. Drive technical-debt reduction (retirement analysis). Identify programs, jobs, reports, and interfaces that are dead, redundant, or no longer consumed; build the evidence (runtime history, downstream consumers, business confirmation) to support retirement decisions; and execute the safe removal of validated candidates.

Trace dependencies and impact. Determine what breaks when a program, table, copybook, or job changes, across UOPS and its integrations (warehouse management, EDI, royalty, and financial systems). Use AI tooling as a force multiplier. Run and refine AI-assisted analysis of COBOL programs and job flows; critically validate generated findings against source and production data before they become program deliverables; contribute improvements to the team's analysis prompts and skills.

Modernization support Explain legacy behavior to the team. Act as the go-to resource for the Modernization Lead, .NET Developer, and QA Engineer when a replacement design or a reconciliation discrepancy requires understanding what the COBOL actually does. Validate functional parity. Review parallel-run ("shadow") reconciliation differences between legacy and replacement output, determine whether each is a defect, a timing artifact, or an intentional change, and confirm root causes in the legacy code.

Support cutover and retirement. Help plan the sequence for disabling legacy jobs, confirm no residual consumers remain, and assist with rollback if needed. Maintenance and production support Maintain, enhance, and debug COBOL modules running in the .NET COBOL environment, ensuring backward compatibility and stability.

Support day-to-day operations of the Order Management System, including incident resolution, bug fixes, batch failure recovery, and performance tuning. Write, review, and optimize T-SQL queries and stored procedures against SQL Server, including analysis queries against large production datasets. Provide on-call or off-hours support on a rotation for high-priority production issues.

Follow version control, testing, and release-management practices for all changes. Required Qualifications 5+ years of hands-on COBOL development experience , including reading and reasoning about large, unfamiliar, sparsely documented programs, not just maintaining code you wrote. Ability to come up to speed quickly in a Windows-hosted COBOL environment.

Our COBOL runs on a .NET COBOL platform (Fujitsu NetCOBOL with JCL and CICS emulation) rather than on a mainframe. Prior experience with NetCOBOL, Micro Focus, or a similar emulated environment is helpful but not required; what is required is solid COBOL fundamentals and a track record of learning new platforms and toolchains quickly.

Strong JCL and batch-processing knowledge , including job streams, PROCs, utilities, execution sequencing, restart/recovery, and job-scheduler concepts (Auto. Sys or similar). Proficiency with Microsoft SQL Server and T-SQL , including writing substantial queries against large datasets, reading and writing stored procedures, and basic indexing and performance concepts.

Embedded SQL in COBOL is a plus. Strong analytical and written-documentation skills. Able to turn source code into clear, structured findings (business rules, data flows, dependency maps) that non-COBOL colleagues can rely on. Writing is a core daily output of this role. Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or similar) for code analysis, documentation, or development, with the judgment to verify generated output rather than accept it.

Self-directed and delivery-oriented. Able to take a program or job box, own the analysis end to end, manage competing priorities between project and support work, and deliver on committed timelines with minimal supervision. Proven structured debugging ability , diagnosing complex production issues across COBOL, batch, and database layers.

Strong communication skills and comfort working with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience on a legacy modernization, decommissioning, or platform-migration program, especially one involving retirement analysis, parallel runs, or reconciliation-based validation. Prior hands-on work with COBOL in a Windows/.NET emulated environment (Fujitsu NetCOBOL, Micro Focus, or equivalent). Experience with CICS or CICS-emulated online programs (e.

g., Neo. Kicks) in addition to batch. Familiarity with C# / .NET, enough to read replacement code and collaborate with the .NET Developer on parity questions. Not required to write it. Experience with SQL Server features, Query Store, or batch-contention tuning. Exposure to Azure (Azure SQL, Azure VMs) or an on-premises-to-cloud migration.

Experience supporting order management, supply chain, fulfillment, distribution, EDI, or ERP systems. Understanding of publishing industry and book supply-chain workflows. What Success Looks Like Every program or job box assigned for discovery has a complete, validated analysis (inputs, outputs, business rules, dependencies) that the team uses as-is to design its replacement or retire it.

Dead and redundant programs and jobs are identified with evidence, confirmed with the business, and removed from production without incident, measurably shrinking the legacy footprint. Reconciliation discrepancies are traced to a definitive root cause in the legacy code, quickly. Colleagues who do not know COBOL can get a clear, reliable answer to "what does this program actually do?

" within a day. Production support obligations are met without stalling modernization deliverables. Simon & Schuster India is an equal opportunity employer (EOE). At Simon & Schuster India, the spirit of inclusion feeds into everything that we do. From employee benefits/programs and social impact outreach initiatives, we believe that opportunity, access, resources, and rewards should be available to and for the benefit of all.

Simon & Schuster India is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, creed, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, and Veteran status.

Candidates hired for this or any other posted Simon & Schuster India role will be employees of Simon & Schuster Publishers India Private Limited, subject to all policies, including the Workplace Privacy Notice , and eligible solely for the benefits plans thereof.