Senior Systems Engineer - IBM i

Tell me about a CL program you wrote that automated something your team used to do by hand.

What they are checking: Whether they write practical automation that saves time and reduces mistakes in daily operations.

Tell me about the hardest IBM i problem you ever troubleshot with a database or application team.

What they are checking: Whether they can work through tough problems methodically across teams instead of pointing fingers.

How do you mentor newer systems engineers on a platform where experienced people are getting harder to find?

What they are checking: Whether they share knowledge deliberately so the team is not dependent on one person's long experience.

What does good documentation look like for an IBM i environment, and how do you keep it current?

What they are checking: Whether their documentation is accurate enough that someone could recover a system with it at three in the morning.

An application team wants to deploy a change during peak hours and says it's low risk. What do you do?

What they are checking: Whether they protect system stability with clear change discipline while still working well with the application team.

Walk me through how you monitor and tune performance on an IBM i system when users report that jobs are running slowly.

What they are checking: Whether they know where to look, such as subsystems, memory pools, job priorities and disk, rather than guessing.

Tell me about the backup strategy you've run with Backup Recovery and Media Services. How did you prove you could actually restore?

What they are checking: Whether they test restores regularly, since a backup nobody has restored is only a hope.

How have you set up high availability and data replication for IBM i, and what happened during your last role swap?

What they are checking: Whether they have real HA and DR experience, including the messy parts of switching production to a backup system.

Walk me through planning an IBM i OS upgrade on a mission-critical system that supports warehouse operations.

What they are checking: Whether they plan prerequisites, PTFs, testing, downtime windows and rollback carefully for a system the business depends on.

What do you use HMC for in your environment, and how do you approach LPAR capacity planning?

What they are checking: Whether they understand partition management and can forecast growth before the system runs short of resources.

How do you keep IBM i systems secure and aligned with IT policy, especially around user profiles and authorities?

What they are checking: Whether they manage object authority, special authorities and system values carefully, which is often overlooked on IBM i.