Technical Director

Technical Director - Cloud Infrastructure Management

Job Description

The role of the Technical Director involves leading a team from a technical perspective and providing IT support related to cloud infrastructure management. This includes diagnosis, resolution, root cause analysis of issues and identifying problem workarounds. Additionally, the person will ensure service requests are actioned according to service levels and performance targets.

Key Accountabilities

• Strategic Focus: The operational support and continuous improvement of the cloud infrastructure estate, and processes, for development and test environments (system, load, performance, UAT) up to and including production.
• Automation: Process efficiency and appropriate tooling is utilised to reduce cycle times, and improve reliability, audit and traceability for all system deployments across multiple applications.
• Process Standards: Consistently applied and constantly improved upon process, best practice and system build standards.
• DevOps Collaboration: Working with DevOps, the development team has the right environment to maximise efficacy and obstacles are removed and automation introduced where appropriate.

Operational Management

• Production Management: Ensuring production is managed, supported and controlled with the appropriate level of governance and agility.
• Environment Governance: Production environments are protected by governance, good practice/process, design and 'fit for purpose' environments, to the left of pre-production, supporting all project and change activity.
• Project Release Management: Ensuring project and change releases 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.
• Design Contribution: Contributing to software and application design ensuring it is the best it can be aligned to the constraints of the project/change.
• Continuous Improvement: Addressing weak points in process, technology and service through a culture of continual improvement;
• Documentation: Ensuring 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.
• Service Delivery: 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

• Resource Provisioning: Providing skilled, capable resource to project/change leads suited to the delivery. Where gaps in skills or resource exist; these are managed to reduce the risk to change, projects or the business.
• Team Management: Managing a team of test environment engineers & middleware specialists and supporting environment management on non-production environments.
• Technical Skills Development: Developing technical skills required for test environment management function for self and the team.
• Global Support: Providing EDT support along with the global team as part of test environment management team.

Governance & Risk

• SLA Performance: Ensuring percentage and number of SLAs met (environment availability, responsiveness to requests etc).
• Release Quality: Percentage of releases/deployments to production without issue.
• Incident Levels: Post deployment incident levels achieving set targets.
• Server Patching: Server patch levels adhere to policy.
• Process Documentation: Percentage of formal processes documented.

Experience & Personal Attributes

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 10+ years of IT experience in relevant technologies or engineering teams.
• 5+ years of 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 an additional advantage.
• Prior experience in leading a 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 the 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.

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