IBM Z systems still run the world's banking, insurance, and healthcare backbones, and I've spent my final years at Wolverhampton building real depth here, not just curiosity. I was one of the top IBM Z Student Ambassadors globally, served as Secretary / Vice-President of the Mainframe Student Society, earned a perfect score in my High Performance Computing module, and shipped JCLcheck, a real lexer/parser/AST validation engine for JCL. Open to graduate and entry-level mainframe engineering roles.
100%
High Performance Computing
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Credly Badges
Superstar
IBM Z Student Ambassador Tier
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Live JCL Validation SaaS
Leadership
Community
Academic Foundations
My BSc (Hons) Computer Science at the University of Wolverhampton finished with a First Class classification, and my final-year module work leaned directly into the systems fundamentals that mainframe and enterprise computing are built on.
High Performance Computing (6CS005), a Level 6 module covering parallel and concurrent computation at scale, was graded 100% (P100), the same discipline that underpins how mainframe workloads are managed and optimised in production. I paired that with modules in Complex Systems, Distributed and Cloud Systems Programming, and Numerical Methods and Concurrency, all part of building a genuine, examined understanding of large-scale system behaviour, not just an interest in it.
Credentials
Verified via Credly — full profile at credly.com/users/zubairidrisaweda ↗
Writing
I write beginner-friendly explainers on mainframe internals, published on Medium, with an interactive companion series built for the way I wish I'd first learned this material.
Featured Build
JCLcheck is a real, self-contained JCL validation engine — lexer, parser, AST, and rule-engine — that I built and shipped as a free, live product. It runs entirely without a mainframe: paste JCL into the browser workbench and it's checked against rules distilled from the IBM JCL Reference, at the z/OS level and JES you choose.
The engine checks statement ordering, DD rules, keyword legality (with Levenshtein-distance "did you mean…" suggestions), DISP/SPACE/DCB/REGION/TIME/DSN value syntax, IF conditions, JES2 job groups, in-stream and catalogued PROCs with symbolic (&SYM) parameters, and how each dataset flows through a job's steps. Every diagnostic ships with a plain-English message and a suggested fix, built for people still learning the syntax.
The Vue 3 workbench has a 3270-terminal-styled editor with hover explanations for every keyword, a PF-key action bar (F1 Help / F4 Format / F5 Validate / F6 Share / F9 Sample / F12 Clear), shareable links and site profiles. The engine is also published on npm as jclcheck, a zero-dependency CLI whose SARIF output puts JCL problems on GitHub pull requests.
Much of the later work was AI-driven and spec-driven: each feature specified first, planned as an OpenSpec change and built with Claude Code against a regression suite of around 750 tests, with every decision on JCL behaviour and every change reviewed by me.
Let's Connect
I'm looking for graduate or junior mainframe engineering roles where I can keep building on IBM Z/z/OS foundations — JCL, enterprise batch processing, and the systems that keep banking and insurance infrastructure running. If your team is hiring, or you just want to talk mainframes, I'd love to hear from you.