Senior Technical Operations Specialist

Overview

As a Technical Operations Lead, you will be responsible for leading the technical team from a strategic perspective and providing IT support related to application environments and interfaces both on-prem and cloud. This includes diagnosis, resolution, root cause analysis of issues, and identifying and documenting problem workarounds. You will also ensure service requests are appropriately actioned according to service levels and performance targets.

Driving an automation-first culture and developing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines is at the heart of all we do. Ensuring platforms conform to necessary high availability (HA), business continuity (BC), and disaster recovery (DR) requirements is essential. Working with the DevOps team to deliver a resilient environment platform is critical.

Key Responsibilities include:

• Strategic Focus
• Operational Management
• People Leadership
• Governance & Risk

Strategic Focus

• For operational support and continuous improvement of 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 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.

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.