Senior IT Manager

Job Title: Technical Lead

The technical lead is responsible for overseeing the technical aspects of a team and providing IT support related to various applications and environments. This includes diagnosing and resolving issues, identifying and documenting problem workarounds, and ensuring that service requests are appropriately actioned according to service levels and performance targets.

In addition, the technical lead will manage and provide technical support to core business application environments to ensure 24x7 availability. This includes driving an automation first culture and developing CI & CD pipelines to ensure repeatability and resilience in all processes.

The technical lead will also work with the wider DevOps team to deliver a resilient environment platform and implement best practice, tooling, and methodology to enhance and grow the capability and quality of the service provided by the Business to our Clients.

• Strategic Focus
  • 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 utilized 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.
• Operational Management
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
• People Leadership
  • Skilled, capable resource is provided 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.
  Required Skills and Qualifications:

To be successful in this role, you will need:

• 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 an 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.

This role offers:

• A competitive salary and benefits package.
• A dynamic and supportive work environment.
• Opportunities for career growth and professional development.