Lead Platform Engineer at Absa

Join an exciting and dynamic team of Storage Platform Engineers, who are responsible for shaping the storage landscape for the bank.

Work within the Platforms and Engineering Storage team responsible for the development, design and run of the bank’s Storage platforms. Build high-performing, scalable, enterprise-grade Storage 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.

What you’ll get to do:

• 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

What do you need to get in?

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems or related field is advantageous
• 10 or more years of general IT experience
• Storage Administrator Certification in relevant applications compulsory e.g. EMC, IBM & Related Technologies, CISCO
• Minimum 8 years’ Storage Administration experience.
• Minimum 8 years’ Experience in design, engineering, implementing and supporting Enterprise Storage technology and solutions: SAN/NAS
• Minimum 8 years' experience with FC network administration
• Minimum 5 Years’ experience with Cloud based Storage Solutions
• Thorough understanding of storage networking including NFS and iSCSI
• Solid Experience with both Windows PowerShell and Bash shell scripting
• Minimum 5 years’ IT consulting experience.
• Minimum 5 years’ IT in Finance Sector experience.
• Expertise in Capacity Management.
• Expertise in Quality Assurance.
• Expertise in Service Level Management.
• Experience with using scripting and programming to collect data from storage systems and populating databases (SQL Server, MySQL, Sqlite) is advantageous
• Experience using ANSI SQL to query RDBMS databases / ODBC datasources is advantageous
• Experiencing using REST API's and manipulating JSON datasets is advantageous
• Some/Basic experience with JavaScript and web interface creation is advantageous