Technical lead

Overview

The Individual will lead the team from a technical perspective and provide IT support related to the MPMS Retirement Solutions application environments and interfaces both on-prem and cloud. This includes diagnosis, resolution, root cause analysis of issues and identify and document problem workarounds and provide support for scheduled release upgrades and deployments. The person will also ensure service requests are appropriately actioned according to service levels and performance targets and manage and provide technical support to core business application environments to ensure 24x7 availability.

Driving an automation first culture and developing CI & CD pipelines, ensuring repeatability and resilience is at the heart of all we do. Ensuring platforms conform to the necessary HA BC and DR requirements and working with the wider DevOps team to deliver a resilient environment platform. Working with the management and other technology stakeholders to implement best practice, tooling and methodology to enhance and grow the capability and quality of the service provided by the Business to our Clients.

Key Accountabilities and main responsibilities

Strategic Focus

• For the operational support and continuous improvement of the infrastructure estate, and processes, for Development and Test environments (System, Load, Performance, UAT) for Link Group up to and including Production.
• Automation, process efficiency and appropriate tooling (Management and Deployment/Configurations) is utilised to reduce cycle times, and improve reliability, audit and traceability for all system deployments across multiple applications.
• Process, best practice and system build standards are consistently applied and constantly improved upon.
• Ensuring that, working with DevOps, the Development Team has the right environment to maximise the development Teams' efficacy and obstacles are removed and automation introduced where appropriate.

Operational Management

• Ensuring Production is managed, supported and controlled with the appropriate level of governance and agility.
• Production environments are protected by governance, good practice/process, design and 'fit for purpose' environments, to the left of Pre-Prod, supporting all project and change activity.
• Ensuring project and change release(s) are packaged to the right quality, repeatable between environments without change or modification and deployed to the target environments - ultimately to Production without detriment or issue in agreed timescales.
• Ensuring software and application design is challenged, and contribute to design in any Change/Project, ensuring it is the best it can be aligned to the constraints of the Project/Change.
• Weak points in Process, Technology and Service is addressed through a culture of continual improvement;
• Software and processes are correctly documented to ensure single points of knowledge do not become a problem and skills are distributed across the team and department.
• Ensuring that software Deliverables/Artefacts, as part of any Change/Project, are progressed providing appropriate status reporting and updates as requested by the Line/Project/Change Lead.

People Leadership

• Providing skilled, capable resource to Project/Change Leads suited to the delivery. Where gaps in skills or resource exists; these are managed to reduce the risk to Change, Projects or the Business
• Manage a team of Test Environment Engineers & Middleware specialists and support the environment management on non-prod environments.
• Develop technical skills required for test environment management function for self and the team.
• Provide EDT support along with the Global team as part of test environment management team.

Governance & Risk

• Ensure percentage and number of SLAs met (Environment Availability, Responsiveness to Requests etc);
• Percentage of Releases/Deployments to Production without issue.
• Post deployment Incident levels achieving set targets.
• Server patch levels adhere to policy.
• Percentage of formal processes documented.

The above list of key accountabilities is not an exhaustive list and may change from time-to-time based on business needs.

Experience & Personal Attributes

Experience

• 10+ years of IT Experience in relevant technologies or engineering teams.
• 5+ experience in managing projects, services and engineering teams working on Cloud (Azure), IaaS, PaaS and other Infra Provisioning services.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Management Information Systems and/or equivalent work experience.
• Cloud Fundamentals or advanced cloud/data (Azure cloud preferred) qualification will be additional advantage.
• Prior experience in leading team of platform engineers and support of large complex 24x7 application environments is essential
• Ability to work on new and emerging technologies as required by Link Group Business
• Strong experience providing technical support of applications in Azure
• Strong experience in implementing CI/CD in multi-branch development model
• Strong experience in optimizing processes using DevOps tooling and integration for applications hosted on both on-prem and Azure
• Strong experience in supporting applications on J2EE, Java, JSP, Apache and Tomcat
• Strong experience in Supporting multiple Application Servers including JBoss
• Experience supporting complex integrated applications with API
• Experience in automation of tasks using Ansible, Jenkins, GitHub, PowerShell, Python and Azure DevOps
• Availability to work on call after hours and weekend in a rostered 24x7 environment
• Knowledge of Oracle and SQL Server RDBMS and SQL problem solving & scripting skills is essential
• Experience with IT Service management within ITSM / ITIL framework
• Sound knowledge of MS Office Products
• High level of problem-solving skills to handle complex software and interface support issues

Personal Attributes

• Good documentation skills
• Strong interpersonal skills to engage with people at all levels of the organisation and build strong relationships and trust with clients and internal stakeholders.
• Experience in the Superannuation Industry or at a minimum the financial services industry.
• Highly effective communication, collaboration and influencing skills.
• Willingness to accept responsibility and be accountable for service provided.
• Strong leadership skills with a focus on coaching and developing teams.