Production Support Lead

Full description

The Role & Responsibilities

Reporting directly to Head of Technology Operations, you will be responsible for the management, production support and continual improvement of the cloud computing production environment that our SaaS technology platform runs on, the ownership and management of external software used in production and operational activities, and the creation, maintenance and improvement of tooling used to support operational activities for our platform. You will also lead the team with a focus on proactive monitoring and methodical delivery.

This will involve working collaboratively with Cloud Engineers, DevOps specialists, Developers, Information Security specialists, Operations staff, our Product team and external vendors, with a specific focus on deployment, day to day production support. • Ensure processes and methods are socialized and followed to ensure effective monitoring and control.

• Ensure individual and team projects are delivered within agreed delivery dates.
• Monitor and evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of production support KPIs and dates
• Monitor platform critical processes and systems.
• Install, configure, and support new and existing servers and network infrastructure.
• Plan and implement upgrades needed to maintain service levels, including security. Maintain server uptime consistent with Business goals and metrics.
• Carry out all activities pertaining to supporting the Cloud Infrastructure that our platform runs on, including (but not limited to) monitoring the Application, investigating and resolving Alerts and Outages, configuring the Monitoring/Alerting tooling, investigating external and internal client reported issues, and carrying out BAU maintenance activities.
• Planning, execution and testing of the TS Platform’s Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery capability.
• Manage the performance objectives and professional development of the support team, including initiation, monitoring, review and validation of individual training and development plans in line with organizational and business requirements.
• Identify opportunities to stabilize, scale and simplify operations through continuous improvement activities.
• Liaise with vendors supplying IT related products and negotiate contracts for equipment and services.
• Create and approve policies to mitigate risk related to infrastructure

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Skills:

• Cloud Kubernetes
• clusters
• Preferably Azure, but AWS or Oracle Cloud

 

Qualifications & Experience

• 6-8 years of experience managing a 10+ person team within a Saas Enterprise Solutions Provider.
• 6-10 years of experience with ownership of IT production support and service delivery within a mid-sized technology organization.
• Significant experience of working within a large scale and complex infrastructure management structure including development of architecture and roadmaps.
• Excellent analytical, quantitative, and conceptual problem-solving skills.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, with demonstrable ability to successfully communicate across the senior leadership team while building influence with peers and direct reports as well as suppliers.
• Excellent project and process management skills, with the ability to handle multiple vendors and multiple contracts, accurate work estimation, action planning and management routines.
• Excellent people management skills, with the ability to identify performance gaps, recruit for needed profiles, train and develop engineers to bridge competency gaps.
• Where applicable, understanding of government and industry regulations that will influence contracting approach and vendor behaviour.
• Hands-on experience with design and implementation of distributed systems and containerized services, especially RedHat OpenShift Container Platform and Docker in both Cloud and on-premises.
• Hands-on experience with implementation and use of application and platform monitoring tools
• Hands-on experience with middleware technologies (Kafka).
• Hands-on experience with building and managing MongoDB clusters.
• Hands-on experience with webservers (Nginx).
• Hands-on experience with API Management tools (Apigee) and writing/deploying OAS compliant webservice APIs