Specialist Platform Engineer

Contract position

Minimum requirements:

• Demonstrable experience in server hardware, VMware, Linux Server, and Windows Server in a large enterprise function.
• VMware certification is required (must be current).
• AWS certification is advantageous.
• Core VMware competencies:
  
• vSphere (ESX, vCenter)
• Aria Automation 8 (vRA) Troubleshooting, integration, orchestration - critical
• Aria Automation Config (Salt) Troubleshooting and integration - critical
• VMware NSX - beneficial
• Cisco UCS (Intersight managed).
• Working knowledge of Pure storage, Arista and/or Cisco Data Centre Networking, Dell OpenManage (not critical, but definitely useful)

Responsibilities:

• Positively contribute to, define and implement the development/engineering lifecycle (end to end) and lead lifecycle improvements over successive releases
• Produce simple, extensible, and maintainable features with very few defects. 
• Continually works to find and fix defects
• Leverage platform (service design and code) and engineering technical expertise to proactively identify risks and prevent defects
• Identify patterns that reveal errors and unanticipated problems, and influence telemetry analytics design decisions
• Identify and Apply metrics to drive the quality and stability of code
• Ensure consistent, usable, forward-looking, maintainable test infrastructure
• Apply object orientated design in development and draw from a large base of design patterns
• Uphold our technical principles of: self-service, scalability, re-usability, resilience & stability in all development practices and deliver feature sets that sustainably deliver on these principles
• Apply knowledge and expertise in User / Customer experience to deliver a stable user experience in all design and development that is simple, elegant, and useful
• Proactively identify development practices that work well & leverage and improve these for future solution design and deployment
• Document feature set and constituent design information to produce solution design blueprints and validation collateral
• Based on engineering & platform expertise and a sound knowledge of the business & customer requirements consistently provide key ideas for the enhancement & optimization of the platform
• Develop & document complete designs and implement testing processes that identify and eradicate platform or service-wide problems / improve on platform performance
• Demonstrate a strong commitment to the quality and ongoing quality assurance of the product/services in use, and take appropriate action
• Ensure alignment to platform and service release plans for effective deployment of solution designs 
• Drive and implement design review processes & practices with the team & participate & positively contribute to design reviews for the feature area led by others
• Apply expertise in engineering and available technologies to enable effective review processes
• Cascade review lessons learnt for the benefit of the broader team
• Enable problem resolution across technical teams, apply and or facilitate root cause analysis, deeply understand the root causes of issues and find ways to resolve them (sustainably)
• Continuously review and find ways to optimize team processes & improve engineering quality, productivity, and team responsiveness to feedback and changing priorities
• Optimize, refactors and reuse components to improve performance and maintainability ensuring maximum efficiency, effectiveness, and return on investment
• Take accountability for maintaining platform standards and best practices, and drive adoption across multiple service teams
• Demonstrate knowledge of, identify and find required data for the ongoing monitoring & improvement of the platform feature area
• Proactively monitor the performance of the platform features & solutions
• Translate monitoring data into clearly articulated descriptions of opportunities & defects, their impact to the customer scenario and to the product or service as a whole, and the relevance to product and service targets (within scope of the job)
• Cascade and communicate these insights across the team to influence platform decision making
• Leverage production performance monitoring and customer data to make feature area technical design and implementation decisions
• Synthesize data from multiple sources and present and define concise, impactful conclusions that influence feature teams to solve defects and meet quality targets 
• Accountability: Financial & Cost Optimization, Risk and Governance
• Understand the platform cost model and the optimal cost : serve of the platform, use this understanding to drive the platform efficiency and effectiveness objectives
• Participate in incident management and and DR activity applying critical thinking, problem solving & technical expertise to get to the bottom of major incidents
• Apply Group risk (e.g. Architecture, development, change and release etc.), governance, compliance and regulatory standards and frameworks
• Proactively identify technical risks and mitigate these (pre, during and post release)
• Update / Design all feature documentation aligned to the organization technical standards and risk / governance frameworks 
• Accountability: People
  
• Proactively and effectively (time and quality) collaborate and drive collaboration on features across feature team (e.g. managing dependencies & interdependencies, conflict resolution, information & best practice sharing, problem resolution outside of own area etc.)
• Apply collaboration skills in development practices & issue resolution regardless of team boundaries and lead communication with relevant stakeholders through to conclusion
• Contribute to a high performance team environment & culture as a high performing member of a self-directed team aligned to agile working
• Leverage coaching techniques in all team related activity to drive a higher quality service, design and deployment of technical solutions
• Proactively seek and provide feedback across a range of stakeholders for the benefit of the team & leverage feedback to consistently improve platform solution delivery
• Coach and mentor other engineers and support engineering teams on technical solutions and problem resolution & proactively seek coaching and mentoring from others
• Participate in peer reviews, testing, problem solving within and across the broader team
• Cascade platform performance feedback and ensure capability development across teams to enable efficient & effective platform service delivery
• Drive the design of content, tools and materials for strategy alignment, education & adoption processes to be applied across stakeholder groups