Backend Engineer - AI Transformation (COBOL)

About the Role:

We are looking for a Software Engineer (4+ years) with experience working with COBOL/Mainframe to join the team as an AI Integration Engineer, supporting one of our enterprise clients as part of their AI-Native Development initiative.

In this role, you’ll act as an AI Champion and Modernization Leader, working closely with development teams maintaining and evolving mainframe applications. Your mission is to help these teams integrate AI tools, agentic coding workflows, and emerging AI development best practices into their legacy and hybrid SDLC environments.

The focus is on enablement, training, and integration - not direct feature delivery. You’ll bridge the gap between traditional mainframe development and AI-assisted software engineering, empowering teams to leverage tools like GitHub Copilot and emerging large-language-model (LLM) capabilities to accelerate modernization and improve developer experience.

This is a high-impact, high-visibility position designed for engineers who are hands-on with AI tools and want to influence how enterprise teams evolve their engineering practices. Success in this role looks like legacy teams delivering faster and smarter with AI — not lines of COBOL code written.

What You’ll Do:

? Drive adoption and optimization of GitHub Copilot and other AI development tools in a variety of environments, including COBOL/Mainframe

? Mentor and support mainframe and backend engineers; answer questions, demonstrate workflows, and unblock teams

? Identify opportunities to use AI for code understanding, refactoring, documentation, and modernization

? Continuously track the evolving AI tooling landscape, surfacing relevant capabilities for mainframe use cases

? Measure impact, collect feedback, and identify improvement opportunities across the modernization lifecycle

? Navigate resistance to change with patience and empathy while promoting a learning culture

? Build a library of reusable AI assets (prompts, scripts, workflows) tailored to mainframe and integration contexts

? Partner with DevOps, architects, and management to track adoption and optimize AI utilization across projects

? Serve as the internal expert for GitHub Copilot and related AI dev tools, piloting new features, and best practices
דרישות התפקיד
What You’ll Need:

? 4+ years backend development experience

? Experience with COBOL and mainframe environments (e.g., z/OS, JCL, CICS, DB2)

? Hands-on experience with modern AI development tools (GitHub Copilot preferred, Cursor, or others)

? Strong communication and mentoring skills: influence, patience, empathy are a must

? Experience working in large, multi-team R&D environments or enterprise IT ecosystems

? Comfort working in evolving, unstructured AI enablement programs

? Familiarity with software productivity metrics (cycle time, velocity, feedback loops, etc.)

Advantages:

• Hands-on experience with AI dev tools (GitHub Copilot (preferred) / Cursor / Claude Code/ other)

• Experience mentoring, delivering trainings, or running developer enablement initiatives

• Exposure to AI-assisted modernization or mainframe migration programs

• Familiarity with custom AI tooling, prompt engineering, or agentic development

• Background in architecture or technical leadership roles

• Experience with large-scale enterprise systems integration (.NET, APIs, or hybrid stacks)