Matthew Reiner

Toward the middle of 2023, our previous architect announced that they would be vacating their role.  This left the team in need of a replacement, and that replacement would have to come from our existing pool of teammates.  After a series of lengthy discussions, it was determined that I possessed the best combination of communication and technical skills to make me the ideal candidate.

This new role has brought with it the following responsibilities:

• Accurately gather and document, in detail, all technical and business requirements for the many new projects in which my team is engaged.
• Advocate for best practices to ensure maximum reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Continual education in multiple technologies and services, including: Kafka, AWS, firewall and routing, load balancing, MQ, IIB/ACE, z/OS Connect, and SYSPLEX.
• Understand, on a deep level, our internal and external partners' business goals so that I can propose effective technical solutions.
• Maintain documentation and relevant repositories to ensure the team has current design and process reference materials.
• Ensure solutions are designed to be supportable by the rest of the infrastructure team.
• Manage relationships with vendors, application developers, architects, and management to ensure I am always in the loop and our partners know to whom they can reach out with questions.

In early 2019, I earned a promotion to manager of the MIS team along with a Vice President title, taking on official responsibility for the stability and resiliency of our Mainframe MQ and IIB footprint.  In mid-2019, we began our Agile transformation as a team and we transitioned to a DevOps model as part of that transformation.

Our engineers were split between myself and another manager, where I was made directly responsible for 10 individuals across the United States and India while still working directly with the six additional engineers of whom our global team is comprised.  My technical duties have remained similar to those from when I was a team lead, but my responsibilities have greatly expanded when it comes to the HR, logistical, and interpersonal prerogatives that come with being a manager and mentor. 

My priorities grew to include guiding the team to help ensure that both the team as a whole, as well as our individual engineers, could be successful.  I have accomplished this goal through various means, including working closely with our engineers to help them establish career plans with S.M.A.R.T. goals, creating several my team's OKRs on an annual basis, managing Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) as necessary, influencing other teams throughout the firm so that we can all work smarter, enhancing telemetry to aid in prioritization, and more.

Shortly after the CICS and MQ team was split, I earned the promotion to Team Lead for the newly formed zOS MQ & IIB team.  In this position, I have been leading a global group of engineers that spans three continents and is responsible for designing, building, maintaining, and troubleshooting the Mainframe middleware infrastructure for one of the largest financial institutions in the world.

Responsibilities include:

• Installation, configuration, validation, and long term support of IBM IIB and MQ objects on z/OS including queue sharing groups (QSGs), queues, channels, MQ clusters (including setting up full and partial repositories), flow deployments, etc.
• Altering and ensuring the stability of the MQ and IIB infrastructure responsible for processing trillions of dollars every day
• Leading a major technology audit remediation effort
• Scheduling and managing a global team spanning five locations in three countries
• Coordinating and facilitating multiple events per weekend
• Understanding and approving changes to the environment
• Working directly with senior officers both inside  of and outside of my organization
• Driving troubleshooting and remediation efforts with vendors like IBM
• Interviewing and providing hiring recommendations
• Designing and enforcing platform-wide standards

I worked with the CICS and MQ applications in the Mainframe (z/OS, zOS) space as well as distributed and other platforms.  My day-to-day activities included processing requests from engineers and non-technical business partners to set up new queues, channels, processes, applications, transactions and much more.  Further, I made changes to IIB via OMVS on the Mainframe utilizing my extensive Unix and Linux background.

I was also responsible for the creation, testing, implementation, and long-term support of all aspects of both IBM CICS and IBM WebSphere MQ.  Additionally, I was responsible for the implementation of a biannual maintenance release cycle for both products across 80+ LPARs and 15+ PLEXes.

I worked with Mainframe automation tools, including CA OPS/MVS, SA zOS, CONTROL-O, and others to improve production and integrate the z/OS and distributed spaces. I actioned requests from engineers and businesses to design, create, implement, test, and support various automation solutions custom tailored to fit their needs across our expansive environment.

Specifically, I created various rules (message-based, time-based, request, end of job, etc.) and REXX execs to automate actions on the Mainframe. Additionally, I helped create an internal web-based tool to display the status of several aspects of the Mainframe using the automation tool as a back end service provider.

As a C.A., I was responsible for fostering a community environment on an engineering floor in in our residence hall.  I was required to plan at least 10 programs per semester for 50+ residents, raise awareness for issues on campus, make myself available for residents to offer advice and to be a sounding board, and I maintained the secure status of Douglas Hall.

This position was highly educational and integral in teaching me many of the soft skills that continue to make me successful in my technical leadership position today.

Technical coursework covered: Unix, Database Architecture, Systems Architecture, C# .NET, C++, REXX, COBOL, IBM Assembly

Activities included: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), LAN at NIU (L@N), Forensics/Debate, IBM Master The Mainframe, volunteer through DeKalb Public Schools, NIU Mathematics Team.