Lead Platform Engineer (Storage)

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

Build high-performing, scalable, enterprise-grade Platform services & build capability in others to do the same. This includes but is not limited to applying critical thinking, design thinking and problem solving skills in an agile team environment to solve complex technical problems with high quality solutions & leading all phases of the development lifecycle to deliver against business requirements at an optimal cost to serve.

Job Description

Platform Design, Deployment & Optimisation

• Leads development test and platform management, translating customer, business and technical requirements into components of a service.
• Identify critical design areas, parameters and opportunity areas early in the development process and those that need improvement downstream.
• Stay ahead of the curve on leading practice platform technologies and incorporate research into solution design and deployment processes.
• Develop lasting, innovative, simple platforms (including architecture when appropriate) to satisfy business and customer requirements and align with the long-term plan for the platform and broader technology objectives of: Self-service, testability, reusability, stability & resilience.
• Apply deep technical expertise, design thinking & problem solving skills to solve complex technical problems and enable the teams to deliver high quality solutions.
• Identify & select the appropriate internal or external technologies to deliver the platform service.
• Applies excellent judgement and identifies and continuously improves on development practices.
• Develop solution design blueprints and validation collateral and facilitate alignment on solution blueprint and designs across the value chain.
• Lead the planning and design of the platform delivery system and define associated tools, hardware, processes, role assignments, dependencies, and documentation, resulting in a complete platform that meets KPIs.
• Lead the development and deployment lifecycle for ‘platform / platform components as a service’.
• Design & implement test automation and ensure reusability across the teams.
• Lead efforts to validate architectural, product or service solutions and innovations.
• Continually develop initiatives to reduce and optimize operational costs & increase strategic & operational efficiency through solution designs.
• Identify, develop & maintain platform standards and best practices, and drive adoption across multiple service teams.
• Define and implement SLA, OLA & quality metrics, best practices, and patterns to be applied across the platform.
• Strategically & operationally monitor Platform services to standard and proactively identify and mitigate risk.
• Use production performance monitoring and customer data to make / inform technical design and implementation decisions.
• Take full accountability for end-to-end platform quality, completeness and resulting user experience for the life of the product / service.
• Use & test the platform regularly to deeply understand it and discover & implement ways to improve it.
• Resolve issues throughout the life of the platform, including those outside of the immediate area of responsibility as needed; lead discussions with peers to take action to ensure the sustainable success of the platform.
• Provide leadership within the business by developing innovative methods for measuring the customer experience, and use this data to identify and drive platform improvements.
• Leverage systems & processes to measure, monitor and manage the performance of platforms ensuring ongoing optimization & cost to value for our businesses (think bank wide).
• Translate performance data into insights for technical service & solution improvement and enhancement (across technical teams).
• Align teams to service improvement & innovation plan requirements and influence effective implementation.
• Lead the design of process or technology solutions that identify and resolve platform, system, deployment, and environmental issues.
• Identify new and emerging practices for managing problems within the area and lead the adoption of new practices, across groups or disciplines with the aim of improving analytical capabilities.
• Lead the resolution of service issues by analyzing and prioritizing data from stakeholders and directing efforts or applying deep subject matter expertise to restore service with minimal disruption to the customer and business.
• Positively contribute to the design & evolution of Group Architecture, Infrastructure & associated technical standards for the organization where it makes sense to do so.

Accountability: Financial & Cost Optimization, Risk & Governance

• Take full accountability for delivering an optimal Platform Engineering cost model.
• Analyse operational cost data, identify cost-savings & efficiencies and influence the business to adopt these efficiencies across multiple service teams.
• Understand & contribute to the delivery of an optimal cost : serve of Platforms as a service.
• Create business cases & solution specifications for various governance processes (e.g. CTO approvals).
• Participate in incident management & DR activity – applying critical thinking, problem solving & technical expertise to get to the bottom of major incidents.
• Hold accountability for all risk associated with platform engineering decision making.
• Apply & maintain all Group risk (e.g. Architecture, development etc.), governance, compliance & regulatory standards and frameworks.
• Update & or develop & maintain all application documentation as per the organization technical standards and risk / governance frameworks.

Accountability: People

• Cascade platform direction across teams and ensure team alignment on platform direction, performance objectives, plans and prioritization.
• Build / contribute to a high performance team environment & culture through self-directed teams by driving performance management & measurement that is aligned with agile working practices (including daily, weekly, etc. sprint routines, regular & honest feedback etc.).
• Assume one stop shop accountability for the right people in the right teams to deliver on our platform strategy (always!).
• Leverage coaching techniques in all squad related activity to drive a higher quality design and deployment of technical products and services.
• Seek out opportunities for collaboration across groups, ensure that cross-team commitments are set, and achieves scale in teamwork efforts by enabling the work of others.
• Proactively lead the implementation of agile practices, remove barriers to success and ensure seamless delivery in a continuously changing work environment.
• Identify and develop needed skills (self and others) in a way that is best-suited to the service design and that maximizes delivery efficiency.
• Coach & mentor other engineers & support engineering teams on technical solutions and problem resolution.
• Conduct peer reviews, testing, problem solving within and across the broader team.
• Cascade platform performance feedback and ensure capability development across teams to enable efficient & effective platform service delivery.
• Support the people change teams in the design of adoption processes (Customer, Employee & 3rd Party Adoption).

Education and experience required:

• Minimum 5 years’ IT in Finance Sector experience.
• Minimum 8 years’ IT Consulting (as a work function, internal or external) experience.
• 15 or more years of general experience in the Information Technology industry working with computer systems and Infrastructure.
• Minimum 15 years’ experience using the Microsoft Office Suite of products specifically Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Access.
• Minimum 5 years’ experience in Enterprise IT Environments.
• Solid understanding of the ITIL framework and change management principles.
• Minimum 3 Years’ experience with Public Cloud Based Technologies (preferably AWS).
• Minimum 5 years’ experience doing server support (Windows, Linux, AIX).
• Solid understanding of and practical experience with on-premises File Storage systems (at least 5 years experience).
• Solid understanding of and experience with Object Storage systems and software (at least 5 years experience).
• Experience with SAN Storage (Dell PowerMax, PowerStore, IBM Flash System, Pure Storage) and SAN Fabrics (Cisco MDS, Brocade) is an advantage.
• Certification in either Public Cloud vendors, on-premises Storage or Backup vendors is an advantage.
• Experience with iSCSI driver configuration on Linux and Windows is an advantage.
• Experience with Multipath driver configuration on Linux and Windows is an advantage.
• Minimum 10 years' experience with Shell Scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Command/Batch Scripts).
• Experience using ANSI SQL to query RDBMS databases / ODBC data sources is required.
• Experience with a programming language like C, C++, C# - at least 2 years’ practical experience.
• Experience with Python – at least 4 years’ practical experience and able to use Python for:
• Familiarity with HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
• Experience with DevOps and SRE.
• Ability to translate business requirements into infrastructure requirements.
• Ability to create processes, procedures and general operational documentation.
• Ability to create infrastructure designs and architecture diagrams.
• Ability to create disaster recovery procedures and execute for IT infrastructure.
• Expertise in Capacity Management.
• Expertise in Quality Assurance.
• Expertise in Service Level Management.
• Expertise in Operations Management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science or related field, is advantageous.

Education

Bachelor's Degree: Information Technology

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised.