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 Originally posted on Himalayas