Specialist Platform Engineer - Storage at Absa

The Role

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. Apply platform engineering expertise, critical thinking, design thinking and problem solving skills to produce well-organized, optimized and documented source code that successfully delivers platform features, components of the service and solves complex technical problems with high quality solutions. Capable of resolving escalated issues arising from operations of the Storage Platform.

Key accountabilities: (What you’ll get to do)

• Leverage platform engineering expertise & a working knowledge of Storage platforms and their constituent parts to positively contribute to platform feature and service designs
• Take accountability for deeply understanding & building expertise on the platform, the platform contribution to the broader platform strategy & business and customer requirements & all available technologies
• Develop business & customer aligned, lasting & innovative storage platform feature sets
• Produce simple, extensible, and maintainable features with very few defects. Continually works to find and fix defects.
• Leverage platform (service design & code) & engineering technical expertise to proactively identify risks and prevent defects
• Identify patterns that reveal errors and unanticipated problems, and influence telemetry analytics design decisions
• Identify & Apply metrics to drive the quality and stability of storage platforms
• Ensure consistent, usable, forward-looking, maintainable test infrastructure
• Apply object orientated design in development & draw from a large base of design patterns
• Uphold our technical principles of: self-service, scalability, re-usability, resilience & stability in all development practices and deliver feature sets that sustainably deliver on these principles
• Apply knowledge and expertise in User / Customer experience to deliver a stable user experience in all design & development that is simple, elegant, and useful.
• Proactively identify development practices that work well & leverage & improve these for future solution design and deployment
• Document feature set and constituent design information to produce solution design blueprints and validation collateral
• Based on engineering & platform expertise and a sound knowledge of the business & customer requirements consistently provide key ideas for the enhancement & optimization of the platform
• Develop & document complete designs and implement testing processes that identify and eradicate platform or service-wide problems / improve on platform performance
• Demonstrate a strong commitment to the quality & ongoing quality assurance of the product/service’s in use, and take appropriate action to resolve issues throughout the lifecycle of the product or service
• Ensure alignment to platform and service release plans for effective deployment of solution designs
• Drive & implement design review processes & practices with the team & participate & positively contribute to design reviews for the feature area led by others
• Apply expertise in engineering & available technologies to enable effective review processes
• Cascade review lessons learnt for the benefit of the broader team
• Enable problem resolution across technical teams, apply and or facilitate root cause analysis, deeply understand the root causes of issues and find ways to resolve them (sustainably)
• Continuously review & find ways to optimize team processes & improve engineering quality, productivity, and team responsiveness to feedback and changing priorities
• Optimize, refactors and reuse components to improve performance and maintainability – ensuring maximum efficiency, effectiveness, and return on investment
• Take accountability for maintaining platform standards and best practices, and drive adoption across multiple service teams
• Demonstrate knowledge of, identify & find required data for the ongoing monitoring & improvement of the platform feature area
• Proactively monitor the performance of the platform features & solutions
• Translate monitoring data into clearly articulated descriptions of opportunities & defects, their impact to the customer scenario and to the product or service as a whole, and the relevance to product and service targets (within scope of the job).
• Cascade and communicate these insights across the team to influence platform decision making
• Leverage production performance monitoring and customer data to make feature area technical design and implementation decisions.
• Synthesize data from multiple sources and present & define concise, impactful conclusions that influence

Role/Person specification: (What do you need to get in?)

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems or related field is advantageous
• 7 or more years of general IT experience
• Storage Administrator Certification in relevant applications compulsory e.g. EMC, IBM & Related Technologies, CISCO
• Minimum 5 years’ Storage Administration experience.
• Minimum 5 years’ Experience in implementing and supporting Enterprise Storage technology and solutions: SAN/NAS
• Minimum 5 years' experience with FC network administration
• Experience with Cloud based Storage Solutions is advantageous
• Thorough understanding of storage networking including NFS and iSCSI
• Experience with both Windows PowerShell and Bash shell scripting is advantageous
• IT in Finance Sector or large corporate experience is advantageous.
• Experience in Capacity Management.
• Experience in Quality Assurance.
• Experience 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 data sources is advantageous
• Experiencing using REST API's and manipulating JSON datasets is advantageous
• Some/Basic experience with JavaScript and web interface creation is advantageous
• System administration with Windows, Linux and Virtual Environments (VMWare, OpenStack etc) is advantageous

If you’re passionate about working in a fast-paced environment and contributing to the exciting world of Storage Platforms by leading from the front, we would love to hear from you!