Application Specialist II - Insights Platform and Data Management at Shoprite Group of Companies

Job Objectives    
1. Plan and manage all activities with the data management application technology portfolio within his/her responsibility:

• Monitor and control allocated human and material resources
• Manage and resolve re-active tasks
• Planning and managing tactical projects to add features or optimise performance
• Manage third-party software releases
• Manage application configuration
• Manage project dependencies, team and stakeholder relationships relative to project and business as usual use of the applications
• Co-ordinate and integrate activities across multiple functional lines

2. Ensure timely and effective communication with the project team, the project stakeholder, and business support users.

• Liase with other managers within the ICT functions and within the business
• Manage use expectation through regular communication with the user group

3. Effectively manage day-to-day IT operations relevant to the application under their responsibility, including being on call to respond to incidents.

• Create procurement order and change requests
• Follow-up of procurement order and change requests
• Monitor and follow up on service desk calls
• Identify and resolve any support call trends
• Handle any relevant support issues
• User support in specified area
• 2nd Level Support for specified area
• Train 1st level support where required

4. Where relevant manage vendor relationship with third party application suppliers and service providers

• Investigate new technologies within the specified area
• Manage software bug list with vendors
• Manage SLA with vendors
• Schedule change requests with vendors

Qualifications    

• Matric
• 3-year IT Related Degree/ Diploma or 10 years equivalent experience

Experience    

• 5 years experience within an IT support management position
• 5 years experience in the Retail/ Wholesale/ FMCG industry
• 3 years experience with large data volumes and related dataloads

Knowledge and Skills    

• 5 years broadly skilled in information and communication technology with specific focus on big data, business intelligence or data warehousing.
• 5 years knowledge of all steps of systems development from specification to implementation.
• Exposure to vendor management
• Exposure to project management
• Knowledge of change management
• Experience with configuration, administration, and troubleshoot issues with Hive or Pyspark jobs running on MapR or other Hadoop distribution
• Experience with understanding and resolving performance issues in providing QA support for jobs running on MapR or other Hadoop distributions
• Experience with integration of ETL workflows into an enterprise-wide scheduling environment.