Technical Lead - Cloud

Key purpose:
With the introduction of cloud, namely Azure and AWS, we require an additional technical lead to support our customer services organisation. This technical lead will be split between the Proactive team and our Cloud clients to ensure we meet the contractual requirements. This role is a central point for evaluating, optimizing and standardization of managed Cloud services. It focuses on the enablement of the operational teams to effectively deliver on required service levels and the optimization of the services on a proactive basis. Resolution of major incidents that are escalated from the operational teams and logging of vendor calls when required. Perform due diligences to ensure services are scoped correctly, risks are highlighted to the business and successfully transitioned to the operational teams. Our clients are becoming highly skilled, this role will close the knowledge gap between our RMS teams and client teams. Cloud solutions require constant management with architectural updates and changes, security and cost management to name a few, this role will be accountable to set the standards that will be disseminated to the RMS squads.
Duties and responsibilities:

Evaluation of Azure & AWS services and ability to align to client specific requirements

Optimizing of Azure& AWS services and ability to align to client specific requirements

Operational Cloud platform service delivery enablement

Perform advanced issue analysis and resolution

Address major incident escalations

Conduct service due diligences

Transition services to operational teams

Conduct technical assessments and participate in service improvements

Identify security risk and track until mitigated or resolved

Conduct evaluations on engineers and make growth and training recommendations

Create internal knowledge base articles and issue resolution scripts

Consistently review and improve on the current client deployments to ensure that platforms are aligned to best practice by ensuring quality of the Technical Maturity of the customer environment

Build support and growth models for the Managed Services engineers to ensure that the tools are correctly used

Assist with building client solutions and provide input to proposals and designs

Fulfil the key role of reviewing client solutions and sign off the project to operational handovers

Responsible for working closely with the account team and client and collaborating with our technical teams, in all lines of business, to determine the appropriate design, and develop the overall implementation solution plan

Be the cross technical specialist and demonstrate leadership, by being able to understand the technology that is needed to meet the client's business requirements, and articulate this to both technical and business stakeholders

Manage customer proof of concept initiatives such as ensuring the correct resources are being used, managing the set-up and delivery

Provide technical guidance to our internal teams and clients in order to successfully produce large customer solution proposals

Lead the large complex service design with clients and lead the internal service teams to enable business outcome and requirements mapping

Drives design of the Managed Service offering, interfacing between the platform delivery and platform run teams

Contributor for vendor management and support the transition to service delivery by providing service architecture (e.g. service management, service consumption, delivery modelling)

Managed services catalogue by building a model that can be used globally for the monitoring service

Contribute to the knowledge base of company development and services by sharing best practices with internal teams and clients

Coach/mentor leadership to engage with other team members and act as advisor and decision maker in service design situations

Review the client's services requirement landscape and develop a model, detailing the most suitable methods for the delivery and consumption of said service requirements. This is performed in collaboration with a Platform Architect, covering the design part of the platform

Develop a schedule describing how Dimension Data will drive innovation within the client environment throughout the life of, or at certain points, or with Agile Devops approach in the contract; conducted in strong collaboration with the Platform Architect, covering any development of the platform

Take the service schedules & SLAs developed through the value proposition development phase, develop them to contract quality and deliver them for inclusion in the schedules of the master services agreement

Drive validation processes by obtaining sign-off from technical, service and financial profiles

Understand and influence client operating models

Qualifications and experience:

Tertiary Bachelor Degree or Relevant Qualification

Certified in AWS Practitioner and Architect

Familiarity with Windows, MacOS, and Linux operating systems.

ITIL foundation v3 / v4 certification an advantage

Required skills:

Good understanding of Azure & AWS Infrastructure services and their limitations

Current industry cloud certifications are a must

Experience in configuring & monitoring different attributes and handling scale up and scale down scenarios for the application in Azure & AWS

Application monitoring through operations insight, application insight

Provide best practices around provisioning production and non-production environments on Azure & AWS to optimize the usage

Have good understanding in implementation of advanced security, authentication and single sign on across cloud and on premise

Strong understanding of the advantages and limitations of Azure Active Directory

Strong experience in Azure & AWS platform Services, understanding of their capabilities and limitations and being able to architect and deliver solutions leveraging various platform services

Able to collaborate and communicate ideas to team members, clients and vendors in order to lead, take ownership and manage the implementation of a solution

Mentor and engineers and consultants in their product knowledge, as well as product support and product specialist team members in relation to the customer landscape to ensure that solutions are in line with technical direction of customer

Ensure we design innovative, value-add solutions for our clients

It is important to us that you keep abreast of market trends and survey the marketplace for solution insights, new vendors and methods

Have a broad level of knowledge across Enterprise Architecture, Managed Services, Service Management consulting, and multiple solutions areas (Business Units), and across domains, delivery units, and geographies

Have experience in implementing enterprise application using platform services like azure websites, Azure SQL, Azure Service Bus, notification hubs, event hubs, stream analytics, Document Db, application insights etc.,

Strong expertise in building cloud native enterprise scale applications and moving applications from on-premises to cloud environments

Strong understanding of the cloud architecture patterns and solution design principles

Strong understanding of different attributes for cloud application availability, scalability and ability to propose optimized design for cloud

Performance tuning of cloud-based applications for best performance

Experience in defining and implementing Hybrid scenarios with workloads shared across on premise and Microsoft Azure, application Integration between cloud and on-premise environments

Collaborating with customers for quick technical assessment and proposal development for leveraging platform services of azure

Closely work with customer to understand the business objectives and define solutions to meet the business objectives

Experienced in working in Agile/Devops environment with continuous integration and continuous deployment and application lifecycle management

Strong ability to explain complex technical solutions in business language to project stakeholders with limited technical understanding.

Good writing skills and the ability to write solution proposals in business language

Possess the ability to research new solutions and keep knowledge up to date

Possess a growth mindset, willing to grow, expand and learn new skills

Willing to study and attain certifications required by the business as and when the need arises.

Originally posted on Himalayas