Platform Owner at Old Mutual South Africa

Job Description

Role Overview:

• Responsible for the technical performance of a platform, as well as the evolution of the platform. Ensure the integrity, consistency and resilience of platform features and functions across geographies and manage the backlog of defects, gaps and design features (as well as technical debt items) to ensure availability, reliability, performance and security to appropriate levels to enable high quality customer service across the organisation. Oversee core responsibilities and behaviours of platform team.

Key Result Areas:

Develop and maintain Platform Architecture and roadmap to create visible pipeline of platform features

• Work with stakeholders to define platform strategy and roadmap that encompass the current and future needs.
• Develop and maintain as-is and to-be conceptual, logical, and physical architectures of the platform in collaboration with product owners, architecture, technical and business stakeholders.
• Develop Platform Roadmap of key features and activities required for the platform and ensure visibility and delivery.

Monitor & evaluate configuration standards of the platform to maintain requisite stability, resilience & performance levels

• Ensure that the platform is configured to be secure and meet service level objectives.
• Progress the platform’s capabilities toward being able to be built automatically, through CI/CD practices.
• Ensure that technical debt levels are kept under control with regular re-factoring / remediation / simplification.
• Develop and maintain runbooks for all required platform services / functions.

Manage and maintain operations of the platform for audit and stability purposes

• Work with Infrastructure and Operations teams to plan for and maintain the capacity levels of the platform.
• Maintain support levels of platform, ensuring components are upgraded according to agreed versions.
• Conduct disaster recovery testing according to agreed schedules.
• Contribute with technical stakeholders on the development of SLAs for inclusion to platform service catalogues.
• Ensure monitoring exists and that alerts are raised in the events of failure, slow-down, etc.
• Ensure that the platform is secure to prevent unauthorized access and enable adherence to licensing agreements.
• Determine the root cause of all failures on the platform and determine remediation actions.
• Quality assures code deployed onto the platform & ensure deployments follow change & release processes.

Stakeholder Management and engagement to enhance service delivery

• Identify and maintain continuous engagement with customers/users/services of the platform.
• Ensure that the usage guidelines for the platform are documented, published and discoverable.
• Publish availability and performance metrics and maintenance plans for the platform that is readily accessible.

Service delivery to ensure customer satisfaction

• Maintain service, quality and desired outputs across the business process by ensuring compliance to tactical policies, procedures and standards.
• Establish productive operational relationships with key stakeholders across channels and administrative teams.
• Develop work routines in line with operational plans / schedules to manage achievement of service delivery goals.
• Share knowledge & participate to create of standards, control systems and procedures to maintain service delivery.

Manage quality people practices

• Align own behaviour with the organisation culture and values.
• Share and transfer product, process and systems knowledge to colleagues.
• Collaborate and work with wider business teams to deliver required service levels.
• Actively share information with other team members regarding successes, issues, trends, and ideas.
• Cascade direction across teams and ensure team alignment on strategy, performance objectives, plans & priorities.
• 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.
• Actively participate and contribute within the cross functional team.
• Proactively lead the implementation of agile practices, remove barriers to success and ensure seamless delivery in a continuously changing work environment.
• Identify and develop learning plans for the platform engineering role.
• Coach, mentor & support platform team on technical solutions and problem resolution.
• Participate in peer reviews, testing, problem solving within and across the broader team

Platform Overview:

• Build Development Infrastructure and support delivery teams for demos and releases
• Create and maintain the continuous delivery pipeline toolchain, including continuous integration, automated builds, automated build verification testing, and automated deployment.
• Create platform and environments for development, solution demos, and user acceptance testing.
• Prepare technical environments to demonstrate new solution functionality for System and Solution demonstrations.
• Support delivery teams to prepare, package, and deploy solutions (DevOps Continuous Delivery Pipeline).

Provide initial support to delivery teams in End-to-End Testing and improving testing maturity

• Work with delivery teams to create newly automated test scenarios and organise test cases designed by teams into ordered suites.
• Extend test scenarios to data sets that closely match production.
• Test solution performance against non-functional requirements & assist in identifying system shortfalls & bottlenecks.

Requirements - Skills and Experience:

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or other technical/scientific discipline
• Experience in DevOps practices
• Experience in working with teams in a complex IT environment
• Experience in leveraging and deploying into AWS

Knowledge and Skills:

• Ability to conceptualize client needs and translate them into requirements and proposed solution.
• Ability to triage and resolve defects in requisite programming language.
• Continual learning & inquisitive mindset.
• Persuasion, selling, diplomacy and presentation skills.
• Advocate the use of cloud native and open-source tools and software.
• A proactive approach to spotting problems, areas for improvement, and performance bottlenecks.
• Ability to work creatively & analytically in a problem-solving environment.
• Ability to build rapport with team members and clients.
• Strong organizational skills and ability to handle multiple aggressive deadlines.
• Ability to work in a self-directed manner to delivery high quality outputs even under stressful circumstances.

Closing Date

10 February 2023