COBOL/Mainframe Engineer

Location: Seattle, WA

Department: Engineering

About The Role

If you've spent years — maybe decades — on mainframe systems at a large bank, insurer, or government agency, you know two things:

First, that these systems are not "legacy" in the pejorative sense. They are the backbone of the global financial system and critical public infrastructure. They process the transactions, run the batch cycles, enforce the business rules, and keep the lights on for hundreds of millions of people. The code you've written and maintained is some of the most consequential software in the world.

Second, that working on these systems inside a large enterprise is often frustrating. The bureaucracy, the change management overhead, the months-long release cycles, the committees, the endless approvals. You've watched wave after wave of "modernization" led by consultants who don't understand the code, using tools that don't understand the complexity, producing plans that don't survive contact with reality.

We built Glover for exactly this problem — and we need people like you to help us get it right.

At Glover, your mainframe expertise isn't a niche skill to be managed — it's the core competency we're building around. You'll move fast, ship daily, work with the best available AI and the latest LLMs, and apply your hard-won knowledge to build something genuinely new. No bureaucracy. No six-month planning cycles. No death by committee. And you'll be surrounded by people who use AI the way you use a terminal — constantly, fluently, and to gain maximum leverage on every problem.

What You'll Do

• Build the systems that ingest, parse, analyze, and extract specifications from real mainframe codebases — COBOL, RPG, PL/I, JCL, copybooks, and more.
• Apply your deep knowledge of mainframe architecture — batch processing, CICS transaction flows, IMS and DB2 data stores, JCL job streams, VSAM files — to ensure Glover's analysis is accurate, complete, and trustworthy.
• Design the domain models and heuristics that allow Glover's AI agents to correctly interpret business logic, data dependencies, and control flow in legacy code — the kind of understanding that only comes from years of hands-on experience.
• Collaborate with our AI/ML engineers to improve how large language models reason about legacy code, bridging the gap between what the models can do and what the code actually means.
• Work with real customer codebases from Fortune 1000 enterprises and government agencies, validating and refining Glover's output against production-grade mainframe environments.
• Ship daily in a modern development environment (Python, TypeScript, cloud-native infrastructure) while bringing your mainframe expertise to the hardest problems in the space.

Who You Are

• 5+ years hands-on with mainframe systems — writing, maintaining, debugging, or modernizing COBOL, PL/I, RPG, or Assembler in production. Experience at a major bank, insurer, or government agency is ideal.
• Deep working knowledge of the mainframe ecosystem: z/OS, JCL, CICS, IMS, DB2, VSAM, MQ, batch scheduling, and surrounding toolchains (Endevor, ChangeMan, CA7, etc.).
• You understand how business logic is encoded in these systems — not just syntax, but patterns: copybook structures, paragraph naming conventions, batch-online interactions, data flow across programs and JCL steps.
• Comfortable (or eager) to work in modern languages and tools alongside your mainframe expertise — Python or TypeScript, Git, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure.
• Excited — not reluctant — about applying AI to legacy systems. You see LLMs and agentic AI as tools that, paired with real domain expertise, can finally solve problems brute-force approaches never could.
• You want to move fast. You're tired of the pace at large enterprises and ready for an environment where decisions happen in hours and your expertise is the most valuable thing in the room.
• Great agency. You see problems, you solve them. You're aligned with a team that believes in using every available tool to multiply its impact.

Why This Role

• Your mainframe expertise is the scarcest, most valuable skill set in the modernization space — at Glover, it's at the center of everything we build. You won't maintain old systems; you'll build the AI platform that helps the world modernize them.
• Work alongside ex-Google engineers, learning modern AI/ML techniques while contributing domain knowledge no one else on the team has.
• Move faster in a week than you moved in a quarter at your last job.
• Startup equity at the intersection of the $300B+ legacy modernization market and the rise of agentic AI.
• A chance to take everything you've learned and apply it to something that can genuinely transform how the world's most critical software gets modernized.

About the Company

About Glover

Glover Labs is building the agentic platform for legacy software modernization. We work with the world's largest enterprises — banks, insurers, government agencies — whose core business logic runs on decades-old mainframe systems in COBOL, RPG, PL/I, and Assembler. These codebases are too complex, too sprawling, and too deeply regulated for existing agentic coding tools to operate on meaningfully.

Our platform builds a holistic understanding of these legacy estates, delivers an objective assessment of the right path forward, and provides a spec-driven workflow that lets product owners and engineering teams modernize quickly, confidently, and with low risk. What used to require an 8-month, $800K systems integrator engagement to even assess — Glover delivers understanding in days and transformation outcomes in weeks.

We're a small team by design — founded by three ex-Google engineers, backed by top-tier venture investors, and entering production deployments with enterprise design partners.

We operate as AI natives. Every person at Glover uses AI tooling relentlessly to move fast, gain leverage, and create machines that create machines. We expect everyone who joins to share that orientation and push it further.