Technical Lead (IT Enterprise Systems Monitoring and Event Management) at The Shoprite Group of Companies

Purpose of the Job

• The responsibility of the Technical Lead is to lead the IT Enterprise Monitoring and Event Management systems team in delivering technical support and systems engineering solutions within a range of IT Enterprise Monitoring and Event Management systems in order to maintain high-performing software systems for a large systems infrastructure, high volume user and consumption of team services. This role leverages advanced system engineering knowledge and expertise to provide technical leadership, team coaching, and mentorship to a team of systems engineers, and ensure high-quality systems engineering and administration practice and performance, whilst driving efficient technical support, systems improvement, documentation, and recommendations of technical solutions

Job Objectives

Systems Engineering and Administration Technical Leadership

• Provide technical leadership in the overall execution of system engineering and administration activities within the team such as troubleshooting, quality assurance, configuration, integration, maintenance, deployment, etc., including defining, developing, documenting, implementing, and/or optimizing technical processes, standards, and best practices.
• Drive overall team efficiency in providing technical support (problem analysis and resolution) services, system administration of Event and Alarm Management Systems and applicable IT Enterprise Monitoring toolset (I.e., CA Spectrum, Network Performance Monitor, Network Flow Analyzer, Logic Monitor, etc.), and ensure team adherence to SLA timelines.
• Drive overall system efficiency and availability, fit-for-purpose solutions, technological maturity, and advancement, including the resolution of problems issues within the applicable systems, in conjunction with relevant IT and business stakeholders and external technology partners where necessary.

Team Leadership

• Lead, coach, and mentor the Enterprise Monitoring and Event Management team to ensure high competence and delivery of individual and team output, removing impediments and ensuring the team is motivated to achieve individual and collective objectives.
• Drive overall team maturity and adequately resourcing to efficiently deliver tasks, identifying and encouraging areas for growth and/or improvement.
• Maintain high standards of application support by establishing good practice and cohesiveness.
• Initiate or participate in the team capacity planning, staff requisition, and recruitment processes, including the new team member onboarding and stakeholder engagements.
• Partner with the Team Manager and internal People Partner (HR) teams to manage team performance, driving training and knowledge sharing for and within the team.

Accurately represent the business units’ needs to the project/program team:

• Validate the requirements and deliverables that describe the products and/or services that the project/program will produce.
• Guide other professionals on the project/program to ensure the content is accurate.
• Present improvement ideas, analyse requests for change,  draft and update system design documentation, understand and implement approved system change requests under change guidance, interface with users, support testing, and provide demos of the changes incorporated.
• Assist in the creation\updating of Enterprise Systems Monitoring Tools documentation.
• Guide the design and implementation of the collaboration and learning activities, including on-the-job coaching, workshops, and training.

Resolve issues relevant to project/program deliverables within their area of expertise:

• Understand requisite knowledge that underlies effective decision-making and is able to describe where anomalies or flaws may occur in the decision-making for the area of expertise.
• Ability to coordinate across teams, working closely with peers to ensure the appropriate focus and sense of urgency is applied to all issues.
• Define and maintain IT’s component, capacity, and application performance monitoring and reporting strategy (processes, tools, & templates); develop enhanced reporting capabilities through standardisation and automation.
• Analyse and recommend performance improvements for enterprise, capacity, availability, and performance monitoring.
• Recommend ideas to streamline operations, improve operations and create processes to proactively determine potential issues.

Vendor Management:

• Liaise and Manage 3rd party vendors to perform installations, upgrades, or resolve logged incidents.
• Ensure the vendors comply with Shoprite standards and best practices.
• Ensure the vendor provides relative feedback to queries or requests as per the agreed SLA.
• Manage the relationships with relevant suppliers to ensure delivery of work requests.
• IT Enterprise Monitoring (Business Activity Monitoring; Capacity Monitoring; Application Performance Monitoring):
• In-depth knowledge of monitoring industry standards and infrastructures and working knowledge of other system components and how they interact.
• Manages internal customer requirements, initiatives, and requests.
• Validates project deliverables, and defines hardware and software requirements for new business initiatives.
• Focuses on the design, implementation, support, and maintenance of large appliances and monitors systems status to ensure operational readiness and complete monitoring of all environments and layers.
• Configures highly available, scalable, secure monitoring infrastructures and modifies settings to ensure proper functionality.

Qualifications

• Degree/Diploma in IT, Information Systems, Systems Support, or related field - (essential).
• ITIL foundation certification or demonstrable experience in ITIL practice – (preferred).
• Project Management Foundation Certification - (desired).
• Industry Certification: Logic Monitor, Splunk, AppDynamics, Solarwinds, Datadog, SAP, Dynatrace, Oracle or related (Desired)

Experience

• +2 years experience in a team leadership capacity or similar with demonstrable experience leading and efficiently managing a team delivery of a high-performing and large enterprise monitoring and event management infrastructure system - (essential).
• Solid experience with specific exposure to mentoring and coaching a team, providing technical leadership, and driving high performance within the context of systems engineering- (essential).
• Strong systems, process, and incidents documentation experience - (essential).
• Knowledge and Skills
• Strong knowledge of enterprise systems monitoring and event management system engineering and administration, including relevant tools - (Essential).
• Solid technical knowledge of systemic problem analysis and resolution practice within IT operations - (essential).
• Well-rounded knowledge of broader IT operations (I.e., networking, system integration, end-user management, IT asset management, etc.) - (essential).
• Solid working knowledge of IT Service Management systems (BMC Helix, JIRA, Remedy, etc.) - (essential).
• Knowledge and experience in API integration - (highly beneficial).