Lead DevOps Support - Sandton at Absa Group Limited (Absa)

Key Accountabilities:

People

• Guide and mentor the support team in their day-to-day tasks
• Capacity Planning
• Planning and facilitating personal development plans
• Effective collaboration
• Conflict management
• Facilitating prioritization of work items
• Team Leadership & Functions

Behavioral 

• Develop, encourage and nurture collaborative relationships with Tech & Business partners
• Participate in planned activities that are appropriate for own and team development
• Contribute and lead to build a culture of collaboration between Change teams, Architects, Development teams, Testing teams, Project teams and Infrastructure ensuring optimal delivery
• Establish mutually beneficial relationships with stakeholders that support thought leadership, innovative and integrated practice solutions
• Customer Centricity should be a core focus point
• Foster and maintain relationships with key individuals
• Lead by example

Application Support

• Perform application support by supporting business areas on multiple applications
• Manage Incidents & Incident Responses using ITIL framework
• Obtain a deep understanding of business and technical processes which affords for greater production support
• Elicit business process information to support technical processes
• Incident post-mortem and analysis AKA Root Cause Analysis
• Ensure team maintain and follow process
• Facilitate proposed solutions for issues picked while performing production support
• Request and suggest tools to be built by Tech Partners
• Find solutions to problems you may encounter
• Improve monitoring and implement new tools or solutions where necessary
• Strive to be in a proactive state as opposed to reactive 
• Identify, develop and drive the automation of daily and mundane tasks
• Be able to document solutions for knowledge share
• Maintain Confluence Knowledgebase
• Build and maintain a network of Tech and business partners

Reporting

• Provide business partners with a snapshot view of previous month
• Real Time reporting to feed into Management Reporting
• Using tools to report to team members and management
• Analyse the data to improve Month on Month performance
• Improve on reporting by requesting feedback from your audience

Other Responsibilities

• Perform Testing when required
• Assist with designing and implementing observability across the estate
• Create and manage CI/CD Pipelines
• Drive Automation
• Continuously improve on personally defined timelines (e.g. each quarter)
• Drive Innovation
• Create and maintain good culture
• To ensure continuous delivery through continuous integration and continuous deployment.
• Assist & lead the process of contingency plans and identify continuity or disaster recovery risks and mitigation plans
• Facilitate Security Patching
• Willing to learn and responsible for Personal Development is a must

Strongly advantageous:

• Strong understanding CI/CD methodology
• Familiar with scripting
• Experience and familiar with modern system practices such as Infrastructure as Code, Config Management, Containers, Container Orchestrators, etc.
• Excellent communication skills, accustomed to share knowledge internally or to other areas.
• Experience mentoring and guiding other people or team members.
• Familiar with DevOps paradigm
• Experience with Observability tools and technologies (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana stack, Elastic, Loki, New Relic, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
• Experience in Cloud Computing – Any cloud certifications are beneficial to your application
• Industry Certification: DevOps & Any AWS or Azure Certification (Desirable)
• Proficient in Windows and Linux Administration
• Proficient with Relational/SQL Databases
• Experience and Understanding on Programming (Desirable)
• Working knowledge of networking and basic security
• Experience with Atlassian tool stack
• Experience with CI/CD pipeline automation
• Scripting (Powershell, Bash, etc.)
• Application support, Troubleshooting, RCA
• Monitoring and Logging (Application & Infrastructure)

Qualifications and Experience

• Degree in Computer Science/IT/related field, or equivalent working experience
• Minimum 8+ years’ Technology experience
• Proven track record of leading a team
• Effective stakeholder management and engagement
• 2+ years of Programming experience
• 2+ years experience in a DevOps role (Desirable)
• 2+ years in a Production Application Support Environment
• 2+ years experience administrating Observability (Desirable)