Technical Lead - Cloud

Key purpose:
With the introduction of cloud, namely Azure and AWS, we require an additional technical lead to support our customer services organisation. This technical lead will be split between the Proactive team and our Cloud clients to ensure we meet the contractual requirements. This role is a central point for evaluating, optimizing and standardization of managed Cloud services. It focuses on the enablement of the operational teams to effectively deliver on required service levels and the optimization of the services on a proactive basis. Resolution of major incidents that are escalated from the operational teams and logging of vendor calls when required. Perform due diligences to ensure services are scoped correctly, risks are highlighted to the business and successfully transitioned to the operational teams. Our clients are becoming highly skilled, this role will close the knowledge gap between our RMS teams and client teams. Cloud solutions require constant management with architectural updates and changes, security and cost management to name a few, this role will be accountable to set the standards that will be disseminated to the RMS squads.

Duties and responsibilities:

• Evaluation of Azure & AWS services and ability to align to client specific requirements
• Optimizing of Azure& AWS services and ability to align to client specific requirements
• Perform advanced issue analysis and resolution
• Transition services to operational teams
• Conduct technical assessments and participate in service improvements
• Identify security risk and track until mitigated or resolved
• Conduct evaluations on engineers and make growth and training recommendations
• Create internal knowledge base articles and issue resolution scripts
• Consistently review and improve on the current client deployments to ensure that platforms are aligned to best practice by ensuring quality of the Technical Maturity of the customer environment
• Build support and growth models for the Managed Services engineers to ensure that the tools are correctly used
• Assist with building client solutions and provide input to proposals and designs
• Fulfil the key role of reviewing client solutions and sign off the project to operational handovers
• Responsible for working closely with the account team and client and collaborating with our technical teams, in all lines of business, to determine the appropriate design, and develop the overall implementation solution plan
• Be the cross technical specialist and demonstrate leadership, by being able to understand the technology that is needed to meet the client's business requirements, and articulate this to both technical and business stakeholders
• Manage customer proof of concept initiatives such as ensuring the correct resources are being used, managing the set-up and delivery
• Provide technical guidance to our internal teams and clients in order to successfully produce large customer solution proposals
• Lead the large complex service design with clients and lead the internal service teams to enable business outcome and requirements mapping
• Drives design of the Managed Service offering, interfacing between the platform delivery and platform run teams
• Contributor for vendor management and support the transition to service delivery by providing service architecture (e.g. service management, service consumption, delivery modelling)
• Managed services catalogue by building a model that can be used globally for the monitoring service
• Contribute to the knowledge base of company development and services by sharing best practices with internal teams and clients
• Coach/mentor leadership to engage with other team members and act as advisor and decision maker in service design situations
• Review the client's services requirement landscape and develop a model, detailing the most suitable methods for the delivery and consumption of said service requirements. This is performed in collaboration with a Platform Architect, covering the design part of the platform
• Develop a schedule describing how Dimension Data will drive innovation within the client environment throughout the life of, or at certain points, or with Agile Devops approach in the contract; conducted in strong collaboration with the Platform Architect, covering any development of the platform
• Take the service schedules & SLAs developed through the value proposition development phase, develop them to contract quality and deliver them for inclusion in the schedules of the master services agreement
• Drive validation processes by obtaining sign-off from technical, service and financial profiles
• Understand and influence client operating models

Qualifications and experience:

• Tertiary Bachelor Degree or Relevant Qualification
• Certified in AWS Practitioner and Architect
• Familiarity with Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems.
• ITIL foundation v3 / v4 certification an advantage

Required skills:

• Good understanding of Azure & AWS Infrastructure services and their limitations
• Current industry cloud certifications are a must
• Experience in configuring & monitoring different attributes and handling scale up and scale down scenarios for the application in Azure & AWS
• Application monitoring through operations insight, application insight
• Provide best practices around provisioning production and non-production environments on Azure & AWS to optimize the usage
• Have good understanding in implementation of advanced security, authentication and single sign on across cloud and on premise
• Strong understanding of the advantages and limitations of Azure Active Directory
• Strong experience in Azure & AWS platform Services, understanding of their capabilities and limitations and being able to architect and deliver solutions leveraging various platform services
• Able to collaborate and communicate ideas to team members, clients and vendors in order to lead, take ownership and manage the implementation of a solution
• Mentor and engineers and consultants in their product knowledge, as well as product support and product specialist team members in relation to the customer landscape to ensure that solutions are in line with technical direction of customer
• Ensure we design innovative, value-add solutions for our clients
• It is important to us that you keep abreast of market trends and survey the marketplace for solution insights, new vendors and methods
• Have a broad level of knowledge across Enterprise Architecture, Managed Services, Service Management consulting, and multiple solutions areas (Business Units), and across domains, delivery units, and geographies
• Strong expertise in building cloud native enterprise scale applications and moving applications from on-premises to cloud environments
• Strong understanding of the cloud architecture patterns and solution design principles
• Strong understanding of different attributes for cloud application availability, scalability and ability to propose optimized design for cloud
• Performance tuning of cloud-based applications for best performance
• Experience in defining and implementing Hybrid scenarios with workloads shared across on premise and Microsoft Azure, application Integration between cloud and on-premise environments
• Collaborating with customers for quick technical assessment and proposal development for leveraging platform services of azure
• Closely work with customer to understand the business objectives and define solutions to meet the business objectives
• Experienced in working in Agile/Devops environment with continuous integration and continuous deployment and application lifecycle management
• Strong ability to explain complex technical solutions in business language to project stakeholders with limited technical understanding.
• Good writing skills and the ability to write solution proposals in business language
• Possess the ability to research new solutions and keep knowledge up to date
• Possess a growth mindset, willing to grow, expand and learn new skills
• Willing to study and attain certifications required by the business as and when the need arises.