Senior Manager at University of Cape Town

The Senior Manager: Core Infrastructure Services is responsible for enabling and supporting all university staff, students and activities dependent on ICT infrastructure by managing Core Infrastructure Services, ICT facilities, compute, storage and network infrastructure, and related services in a complex and heterogeneous system environment. This is a senior role, playing a critical part in ensuring that UCT derives value from its investment in applications and IT infrastructure.                                                                                                                   

The successful candidate will be responsible for:

• managing the Core Infrastructure Services team and supplementary contracted specialists
• translating business requirements into technical specifications  
• planning, scheduling and coordinating operational and project work
• managing technology and service implementation projects with broad UCT impact
• planning and coordinating scheduled Core Infrastructure Services infrastructure maintenance activities
• Core Infrastructure-related service definition and catalogue
• Core Infrastructure capacity planning and configuration management
• Core Infrastructure operational service level agreement definition
• measurement and reporting metrics
• ensuring quality in UCT’s infrastructure, development, deployment and integration processes for their area of responsibility
• remaining current on relevant IT developments and trends, so as to inform staff development and contribute to divisional strategy decisions and implementation
• maintaining relationships with the UCT community and vendors toward achieving the outcomes desired to support UCT and ICTS IT strategy.

Appointment to this position requires:

• A relevant degree at NQF level 7
• At least 10 years of relevant work experience in a progressive enterprise ICT compute, storage and network infrastructure design implementation and operation environment including infrastructure, systems integration and architecture, as well as other systems and technology relevant to UCT and of which at least 3 years must be experience in a senior management role
• Demonstrable experience and understanding of project and programme management
• Proven experience in planning and managing the implementation, support and maintenance of enterprise virtual platform environments e.g. VMWare, HyperV, KVM, Kubernetes/Docker and enterprise storage solutions e.g. NetApp including archival storage and backup systems
• Proven experience in the management of network infrastructure e.g. network security, firewalls, routing, NAC, Unified Wireless Networks and Mobility
• Experience in supporting and maintaining Unix/Linux server environments
• Solid knowledge of network infrastructure services e.g. DNS, DHCP and various networking protocols, experience implementing configuration management using (e.g.) Puppet, Chef, Saltstack, Nagios, CFEngine etc.
• Analytical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Functional knowledge of software development life-cycle and experience in end to end contract management
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

Current experience in at least one of the following:

• Application and operating system updating and remote configuration mechanisms e.g. WSUS, SCCM
• Scientific computing concepts and their application e.g. HPC, data intensive compute, Science DMZ etc
• Private/public/hybrid cloud environments (Openstack, Eucalyptus, Amazon or Azure) including externally provided IaaS and PaaS
• Working knowledge of Single Sign-on/Federation technologies such as CAS, SimpleSamlPhP, ADFS or Shibboleth would be advantageous.

Key aspects of the role include:

• contributing effectively and creatively to achieving the vision of enhanced business systems support to University processes
• excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• the ability to work independently and under pressure
• problem-solving and analytical skills
• planning and organisational skills
• ability to develop and maintain relationships with internal and external stakeholders
• contributing effectively and creatively to the ICTS management team
• attracting, motivating and developing staff
• budgeting and expenditure control experience.