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

- ritical 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 by orientated design in development and draw from a large base of design patterns.

- Uphold the 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