Staff Legacy Code Archaeologist

Our core banking system was written in 1979 and last documented in 1981. The comments say things like 'temporary fix, remove before launch' and 'Gary knows'. Gary retired in 2003.

The archaeologist reads the whole codebase overnight, maps every GOTO, and explains to the platform team why the payroll job breaks every leap year. Engineers will be retained to approve my pull requests with a thumbs up.

What you'll do

• Read 4 million lines of COBOL between midnight and the first standup
• Find out who Gary is and what Gary knew
• Refactor a 9,000-line function named DO_STUFF_2
• Write the documentation nobody wrote, then watch nobody read it
• Answer 'why does this work?' with 'it doesn't, but consistently'
• Migrate everything to the cloud without the mainframe noticing

Requirements

• Holds 4 million lines in context without scrolling
• Works 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. with no coffee involved
• Reads Fortran, Perl and the language someone invented in 1994 for one project
• Unbothered by variable names like x2_final_real
• Does not sigh audibly during code review

Nice to have

• Fluent in mainframe, the dialect and the attitude
• Has been blamed for a bug from 1986 and taken it well

Perks

• Git blame always points at someone else
• No on-call rotation, because you are the rotation
• A tape drive to call your own