Senior Platform Engineer

Overview

The Senior Platform Engineer will provide full lifecycle production assistance to development, testing and Production departments. The Engineer will work within the Platform engineering team to be the hands- on subject matter expert for the application stack with particular knowledge of MS Azure, Cloud environments (PaaS IaaS), MS Server OS, MS SQL Server, PowerShell, IIS and Linux. Working to deliver an automated approach to hardware and software delivery, adopting the appropriate tooling and governance to create repeatable, resilient and controlled deployments. Supporting the day to day management and control of all environments, from development infrastructure and applications right through to Production, ensuring they are aligned and the best possible service available to support business processes, including the provision of out of hours on call.

Key Accountabilities and main responsibilities

Strategic Focus

• For the operational support and continuous improvement of the application and infrastructure estate, and processes, for Development, Test and Production environments.
• 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, system and application build standards are consistently applied and constantly improved upon;
• Setup and configuration of software version release management, cloud provisioning, and monitoring within cloud and hosted environments.
• 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;
• 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;
• 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 Manager;
• Design and implement virtualized and cloud-based architectures, leverage agile development techniques for scripting, and setting up developers so that they can run what they build .
• The deployment and configuration of applications and systems, ensure all releases are documented and packaged appropriately.

People Leadership

• Provide training or mentoring to Platform Engineers in the team on supported tools and environments
• Interact with the stakeholders for their problems and help drive resolution with the help of the team.

Governance Risk

• Help resolving Information Security Corrective actions
• Develop and Maintain Documentation related to Standard Operations Procedures
• Raising security issues and breaches to Manager
• Report to Management of any issues that may impact the Business
• Maintain awareness and champion ITIL best practices
• Adhere to all Link Groups standards, policies and procedures

Experience Personal Attributes

• Build, monitor and support knowledge in some if not all of Windows Server, Cloud, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft IIS install and management.
• Experience as an infrastructure, operations or technical expert operating in the space between development and operations
• CI/CD platform, Terraform/ ARM, Cloud Migration experience. Microservices.
• Experience with IT Service management within ITSM / ITIL framework
• Experience in Supporting multiple Application Servers
• Experience in High Availability and Disaster Recovery Support
• Ability to work on new and emerging technologies as required by Link Group Business.
• Competency across a blend of operating systems such as LINUX, Windows and Unix
• Good documentation skills
• Effective oral and written communications skills
• Willingness to accept responsibility and be accountable for service provided

Desirable

• Demonstrable technical knowledge in Enterprise system Design, Virtualisation, Capacity, Resilience, Monitoring, Network and Performance Management;
• Previous experience in cloud management, code and test, scaling, automation, source control, deployment and back up.
• Experience in tooling, package management, and deployment strategies that support both iterative continuous development
• Experience as an infrastructure, operations or technical expert operating in the space between development and operations
• Experience with a setting up, configuring, and managing standards and open source / vendor tools dedicated to setting up a just-in-time and continuously improving operational infrastructure (eg Azure Automation, NuGet, Git, Octopus Deploy, etc)
• Resourcefulness in getting over problems and establishing clarity.
• Able to define and contribute to Strategic Departmental Objectives;