Systems Administrator at FirstRand Group

As part of our talent team, you will be surrounded by unique talents, diverse minds, and an adaptable environment that lives up to the promise of staying curious. Now’s the time to imagine your potential in a team where experts come together and ignite effective change.

Role summary:

• As a senior support engineer in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Service (VDI) you would be responsible for coordination of the delivery, operational support, maintenance, and implementation of VDI services to the bank’s internal stakeholders and users. This includes implementations both on premise and through public cloud providers.
• The key focus is on delivering quality through a Service Delivery approach to ensure consistent and continuous VDI solutions and technologies are successfully deployed to meet the Technology Infrastructure objectives.
• The role requires a diligent and meticulous approach to maintaining and innovating the current estate whilst ensuring that new technologies are investigated and presented to ensure the VDI solutions are always at the forefront of innovation
• The ideal candidate possesses strong organizational and communication abilities and must be able to address multi-faceted high impact issues effectively and in a collaborative manner.

You will be responsible for:

• The senior support engineer takes full end to end ownership and works with various stakeholder to resolve any production related incidents in relation to supported platforms.
• The role requires the individual to serve as the subject matter expert (SME) for various technical aspects relating to VDI technologies including but not limited to: VMware - Horizon View, ESXi hypervisor, vSphere, vRealize suite (beneficial) Citrix - Citrix director, NetScaler, App presentation, Virtual Desktops Cloud technologies - Azure virtual desktops and Windows365 desktops, AWS Microsoft - Server (2012-current), Windows (10 and Infrastructure hosting hardware - Cisco UCS and Dell
• A keen understanding with regards to Hosted Desktops requires the individual to have hands on experience with Profile Management, Windows Roaming Profiles, Workspace Environment Management, VDI Policies, Connection brokers and gateways, Load Balancing/GSLB, VDI and Cloud Storefronts, and Multi-site aggregations
• Service management disciplines: Change management – Review and raise change control requests that impact the VDI environment and prepare and execute platform changes. Problem tickets to be identified, raised, and followed through to identify root cause of issues. Assign and action service requests and tasks in timely manner via Service ticketing tool.
• VDI Estate health and Monitoring: Respond to critical monitoring alerts including server alerts and system outages. Review periodic reports of sever health, resource usage, user experience, and overall environment performance Review hardware and software capacity and assist with preparing capacity reports on an on-going basis. Review vendor knowledge base articles and newly released updates Implement robust monitoring of the VDI environment using tools such as Citrix Director, Citrix Command Center, and various other system monitoring tools and scripts
• Technical support: Ensure that all processes have been investigated / considered in obtaining the specifications of the user requirements Manage Business Continuity in relation to Disaster Recovery for the platform. Provides technical direction, supports services both proactively and reactively to maintain the availability and resiliency of system infrastructure in accordance with the SLA Installation, Configuration, and maintenance of Published Application presentation Desktop image creation and management including the operating systems (e.g., Windows 10/11) Setup, optimization, and management of Home Directories and/or share storage locations Profile support and analysis of storage and management with regards to personal and application-related data specific to end user Initiate, support, and drive planning & implementation of new projects through accurate research and diligent delivery to strict timelines
• VDI Estate maintenance: Generate internal knowledge base articles and issue resolution where possible Perform platform maintenance and environment upgrades Identify and address vulnerabilities in the environment by engaging with vendors and internal teams Provide complex problem resolution by interfacing with vendor support to resolve these. Responsible for ensuring that all systems are deployed consistent with group standards and best practices.

We will be a match if you have:

• Degree/Diploma in IT or any related discipline would be advantageous
• Valid vendor accredited certification relating to Virtual desktops (VMware, Citrix, or Microsoft Azure)
• Minimum 5 years technical working experience in set up, configure and support VDIs in a large Enterprise environment.
• Proven working experience with Citrix XenApp 7.x, Xendesktop7.x, Citrix Workspace Virtual App and or VMware Horizon 7.x and or 8.x
• Experience managing hosted desktop in a Windows 2008/2012/2016/2019 environments
• In-depth working knowledge of the Windows environment with at least 3 years’ experience related to Windows server administration and a strong understanding of network topologies and concepts.
• Proven Experience with regards to Provisioning Services
• Proven experience with regards to NetScaler/ADC platform
• Experience with other VDI technologies would be beneficial