Manager: Platforms

**Role purpose**:
Platform Engineering is a technically strong individual who takes overall responsibility for leading the agile solution design, deployment and ongoing optimization and evolution of high-complexity enterprise-wide technology platforms & infrastructure delivery and operations.

Due to the wide set of platforms and technologies involved in building and running them, the incumbent needs to be familiar with and have extensive experience in all aspects of data centre and infrastructure management, storage, data protection (backups, ransomware), physical hardware, networking as well as virtual (VMware) and container platform technologies as a service.

TPlatform Engineering is accountable for ensuring all relevant Vodafone and Vodacom-mandated compliance and audit-related activities are executed and reviewed to ensure continued compliance at all times. This includes owning local SA IT policies and the cyber security baseline evidence and outcomes for all platforms and related IT capabilities in this area.

This role also embraces the concepts of Self-Service platforms, AIOPS, Observability, CICD/IaC and DevSecOps practices and is expected to create and enhance platforms and related services that leverage these concepts extensively to support and enable the consumers of these technology platforms to do the same.

**Your responsibilities will include**:
Platform Direction Setting, Solution Design & Performance Management
Positively contribute to the organization-wide platform & engineering strategy & the achievement of ended ‘Platforms as a Service
Set the supported technical platform vision and direction for the Vodacom SA IT, aligned to Vodafone strategies and guidelines.
Influence Vodafone policies, standards and guidelines as need be to ensure it caters for the local SA IT market context.
Cascade the platform vision, direction & strategy across all teams & facilitate stakeholder alignment.
Lead & facilitate the design of the integrated set of platform solution blueprints & coach teams on the strategic direction, vision, platform development, architecture & infrastructure holistically
Take full accountability for the end-to-end platform quality, completeness and resulting user experience for the life of the platform or service.
Assess platform capabilities and drive development plans for exceptional delivery & evolution of the platform.
Lead the design, implementation & adoption of enhanced process or technology solutions that identify and resolve platform, system, deployment, and environmental issues.

Ensure that the necessary SOX and PCI compliance activities are addressed and completed on time as agreed with the relevant governing bodies within Vodacom (always).
Ensure continued compliance with relevant Vodafone and /or local Market security policy requirements (always).
Take full accountability for and lead the design & continuous improvement of an integrated platform-specific cost model & the ongoing optimization of platform efficiencies and effectiveness

Manage and grow a high-performance environment through self-directed teams by driving performance management & measurement that is aligned with agile working practices (including daily, weekly, etc. sprint routines, regular & honest feedback etc.) supported by the Vodacom Grow framework.
Leverage coaching techniques to drive a higher quality design and deployment of technical products and services across technology teams

**Technical / professional qualifications**:
Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Programming, or other related field is essential
8+ years of managing diverse teams and vendors within the IT technology space.
10+ years of experience in the IT infrastructure management and operations space.
3+ years of relevant experience in large-scale Infrastructure delivery and operations automation
Experience working in cloud-native environments.
Experience working in a large agile environment, with multiple teams.
Professional experience and knowledge of the telecommunications industry are preferred.

**Core competencies, knowledge, and experience**:
Ability to build E2E technology roadmaps and capability plans specific to IT platforms.
Experience building technical specifications for platforms and in turn agile features, and service models, in conjunction with IT (consumer) technology teams
Experience & proven track record in platform optimization and overall cost/value management (finance, consumption etc.)
Virtualization and infrastructure technologies, e.g. Windows, Linux, VMWare, Xen, KVM, Docker, OpenShift
Storage and Data Protection technologies, e.g. DELL Storage arrays (Unity, PowerMax, Powerstore, Isilon, ECS, Data Domain), DPS Suite including Networker, Connectrix (Cisco&Brocade) SAN switches
Infrastructure automation and configuration management tools, e.g. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt
Software and hardware vendor solution evaluation and negotiation
Ability to analyse and interpret complex prob