Specialist DevOps at Vodacom

Role Purpose

The DevOps Specialist DLS is responsible for the planning, coordination, and deployment of all releases into production within a particular domain or business outcome.

DevOps Specialist DLS will be responsible for leading technical delivery within Digital and Lifestyle Services (DLS). Be proficient in integration, Micro Service API development, and design. Provide high-level support to resolve complex integration design and development problems. Provide architectural and integration guidance to all systems and project streams ensuring that best practices and governance are adhered to in the development of solutions for Vodacom.

This Role Is Responsible For

• Implementing various development, testing, automation tools, and IT infrastructure within the Event Rating team.
• Configuration of the DLS products and services pricing catalog, and publishing thereof.
• Building APIs, integrating with Enterprise Systems and 3rd party systems, with proven experience in architecting and refactoring complex systems.
• Identifying, managing, and mitigating risks and issues, to facilitate on-time delivery of capabilities and features aligned to the business outcome vision.
• Working closely with the domain or business outcome Product Manager and supporting Product Owners to coordinate delivery of capabilities.
• defining release readiness requirements against business outcome needs and validating readiness before releasing into production.
• Requires deep analytical abilities in system design and requirements decomposition, ability to understand business problems and requirements, and design systems to meet both the functional and non-functional requirements.
• Experience with CI/CD practices, pipelines, containers/containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and microservices patterns.
• Implement and give guidance around cloud services within DLS, and contribute to best practice use of cloud services within Azure, Google, and AWS cloud platforms.
• KPI management and ensuring mandates of uptime, latency, and resilience are met and are consistently above mandated levels.
• Identifying and deploying cybersecurity measures by continuously performing vulnerability assessment and risk management.
• Ensuring that monitoring and alerting are up to date and have a wide coverage to identify and remedy incidents, and prevent outages.
• Handle problem management and trend analysis identifying recurring issues and root causes while implementing preventative measures or mechanisms to identify issues faster.
• Vendor management within the team.
• Squad leadership, guiding the squad within DLS.
• Managing periodic reporting on the progress to the management and the business stakeholders.

Your Responsibilities Will Include

Execute Agile Release Train based on agreed PI objectives

• Drive release planning sessions.
• Facilitate the resolution of impediments and risks within the span of influence. Once an impediment is outside of a Scrum Master’s span of influence this role will step in to remove or escalate the impediment.
• Work with other program leaders to drive the definition and refinement of the program backlog and execution alignment.
• Maintain metrics that provide visibility to stakeholders on program-level plans, progress, and quality.
• Support Product Owners with various requirements gathering and scrum activities as needed.
• Help to assure value delivery.
• Aggregate team objectives into program objectives and publish them for visibility and transparency.
• Assist with execution and feature/capability completion tracking (KPIs/metrics).
• Facilitate periodic synchronization meetings (Scrum of Scrums and PO Sync).
• Assist with economic decision-making by facilitating feature and capability estimation by teams and roll-up to the value stream level and portfolio level.
• Drive relentless improvement.
• Manage program planning of engineering delivery.
• Monitor and facilitate programs.
• Manage the deployment of all releases into production and define/assess release readiness according to business requirements.
• Coordinate and communicate the release pipeline to deliver frequent releases across business outcomes; manage external dependencies, ensuring alignment across key partners and vendors.
• Continuously improve release processes, implementing best practices consistent with agile methodologies.

Tech Lead/DevOps Contributor

• Oversee squads focused on technical issues, including software development, product releases, and engineering tasks. This includes collaborating with colleagues to address technical issues and evaluating the team's work processes and best practices and implementing changes to streamline operations.
• Create and implement risk mitigation processes and oversee security audits to determine weaknesses in applications.
• Coordinating the efforts of product development teams with that of operations teams across the ART. This includes heavy involvement in both the worlds of development and operations.
• Play a key role in the development of new ideas for products and services and manage the process of turning these ideas into realities. This could include participating in product brainstorming meetings, overseeing the creation of product mock-ups, and identifying possible design flaws until the resulting product is satisfactory.
• Work to set up the process by which the product will be produced on a larger scale and figure out how it will be distributed to consumers.

Solution Design Contributor

Play an important role in the development cycle, ensuring the quality of requirements and directing the activities of the design team. This role requires excellent attention to detail, as the SPECIALIST frequently needs to work with the solution analysis and participate in translating them into solutions that align with enterprise-level systems.

In addition to guiding the squads, this role is responsible for participating in the research on existing systems and devising solutions that work within those systems.

The SPECIALIST is ultimately responsible for the Release Train and has to ensure the quality of:

• Functional Requirements.
• Develop Specifications.
• ART Scope.
• Lead The squads: internal and external.
• Interface Directly Business Stakeholders.

Manage sourcing relationships and external vendors.

Ideally You Should Possess The Following

• Matric/Grade 12 is essential.
• 3 Year Degree / equivalent Diploma /equivalent Certificate in Information Technology / Business / Project Management.
• 3 – 5 Years of Integration, Development, and Design experience preferably in a highly complex environment.
• Extensive experience in managing dependencies effectively across multiple delivery teams, meeting deadlines and business outcome objectives.
• Formal training and/or certification in Scaled Agile Framework or similar preferred.
• Certified Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), or similar.
• Experience with project management tools e.g. JIRA, MS Project.
• Professional experience and knowledge of digital and Telecommunica