RPG Developer / Applications Project Manager — IBM i (AS400)
Custom Aluminum Products, Inc. · South Elgin, IL · Onsite · Full-time, 1st shift
Custom Aluminum Products is an aluminum extrusion manufacturer with roughly 550 employees across two Illinois plants — South Elgin and Genoa. The application that runs our business is a custom ERP we built ourselves on the IBM i, and it covers everything from the moment an order is entered to the moment the truck leaves: extrusion, sawing, anodize, paint, fabrication, packing, shipping, purchasing, inventory, invoicing.
We’re adding a role to our technology team — someone to own that application as a portfolio rather than a queue. Decide what gets built and in what order, run the projects, and stay close enough to the code to do the work and judge it.
You’d join our existing applications developer, so you won’t be learning thirty years of accumulated system knowledge from scratch or on your own.
Three things to know before you read further
First: this is a lead role, not just a development seat. About a third of it is project leadership — taking requests from across the business, scoping them, sequencing them against each other, running them to delivery, and telling people honestly what they’re getting and when. Right now that work isn’t happening in any organized way. Requests arrive and get handled in the order they arrive. We’re hiring someone to change that.
Second: this is not a migration job. We are not hiring someone to keep the lights on until a replacement system arrives. There is no migration project. This application is the operational core of the company, it’s staying, and the work is to make it better. If you’ve spent the last few years being told your platform is on borrowed time, that isn’t the conversation here.
Third: part of it is support, and that part is real. Roughly a third of the job is being the person the operation calls when the system won’t do what somebody needs — a PO line that has to come off, an order stuck between two files, a customer asking why a shipment shows the way it does. You’ll be talking to Order Entry, Production Control, and Shipping regularly, and sometimes to our customers’ buyers directly.
Some people love that. It’s the fastest way to actually understand a manufacturing business, and you’re visibly useful every single day. Some people want to be left alone with their editor. We’d rather you know which one you are now.
What you’ll own
· The project portfolio. What gets built, in what order, on what timeline, and whether it actually landed. You’ll set that with the VP of Operations and the department managers, and then you’ll run it.
· The application itself. RPG and CL across the full order-to-ship process. Reading it, changing it, extending it — and increasingly, documenting it.
· The database side. DDS physical and logical files, display and printer files, and SQL against DB2 for i.
· Outside partners. We use an outside firm for BI and data work. You’d direct that relationship on the application side, along with any contract development we take on.
· Customer integrations. Electronic order interfaces with several of our largest customers, and the exceptions they throw.
· Production support. Escalation point for the transaction and data issues that can’t be fixed from a screen. Careful surgery on a live system that two plants are running on.
· The handoff downstream. Our IBM i data feeds a SQL Server reporting environment behind Power BI. You don’t own that pipeline, but what you change upstream lands there.
What you need
· Real project leadership. You’ve run application projects end to end — figured out what was actually being asked for, scoped it, sequenced it, delivered it, and owned it when it slipped. Not “participated in projects.” Ran them.
· 5+ years of hands-on RPG development on the IBM i / AS-400, in production. This is a floor, not a formality — you can’t lead this work without being able to open a thirty-year-old program and form a judgment about it.
· Experience owning a custom, in-house application with no vendor behind it. Code somebody else wrote, sparse documentation, and no support line to call.
· CL, DDS, display and printer files.
· SQL against DB2 for i, including embedded SQL.
· Comfort working directly with business users and managers. You can sit with a production scheduler, work out what they actually need, and tell a department head “not this quarter” without it becoming a problem.
· Onsite in South Elgin, 1st shift, with occasional trips to Genoa.
· Willingness to take the occasional off-hours call for month-end or a production-down issue.
A note on platform: IBM i and mainframe are different worlds. If your background is z/OS — COBOL, JCL, CICS — we appreciate the depth, but it isn’t what this role needs.
Nice to have
· Manufacturing ERP work — order entry, routing, inventory, shipping
· Managing outside vendors or consulting partners
· ILE RPG, free-format, service programs
· Customer EDI or file-based order integrations
· Experience modernizing a legacy system incrementally, without a big-bang rewrite
· Having written a roadmap somebody actually funded
· SQL Server, Power BI, or Microsoft Fabric familiarity
· Formal PM training or a PMP — genuinely nice to have, genuinely not required
· IBM i change-management tooling (we don’t have any — tell us what we’re missing)
Compensation and benefits
$85,000 – $105,000 per year, depending on experience.
Benefits include Blue Cross medical PPO or HMO, Blue Cross dental, and Eyemed vision coverage; company-provided life and disability insurance; a 401(k) with company match; and paid time off plus paid holidays.
Why this job
Most RPG openings right now are one of two things: a contract to help somebody migrate off the platform, or a slot on a large team where you own one module and wait for approvals. This is neither.
You’d own the application portfolio at a 550-person manufacturer and report directly to our VP of Operations — so the person setting your priorities is the person accountable for the plants your software runs. Requests don’t travel through three layers before someone can say yes, and when you say a project will take six weeks, that’s the conversation, not the opening bid.
It also means the whole business is in scope. Not one module — extrusion through invoicing. You’ll know the people whose work you’re affecting by name: the scheduler, the order entry group, the shipping office. When you fix something, you see it working on the floor that afternoon.
If you’ve been the person who quietly held a legacy system together and were never given the title or the authority that went with it, this is that job with both.
Pay: $85,000.00 - $105,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Employee assistance program
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
- Paid time off
- Professional development assistance
- Retirement plan
- Tuition reimbursement
- Vision insurance
Work Location: In person
