Senior Specialist: Service Mgnmt Lending

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When it comes to putting people first, we're number 1. 

The number 1 Top Employer in South Africa. 
Certified by the Top Employer Institute 2024.

Role purpose/Business Unit

This role is responsible for delivering, maintaining, and optimizing infrastructure, database, and middleware capabilities to support and enable the development and operations of applications and solutions. This role is also responsible for reviewing solution designs; understanding their impact on applications & infrastructure; building and implementing infrastructure and applications, and monitoring, maintaining & supporting the operational environments.  In addition, the candidate in this role is responsible for leading and managing VFS IT Lending Service Management relating to incident and problem management, change management, continuous service improvement, monitoring and alerting, SLA and OLA management

Your responsibilities will include:

Change, Incident and Problem Management 

• Leading and facilitating effective incident management activities across infrastructure and application teams to ensure efficient resolution of VFS IT Lending outages and service disruptions.
• Maintain metrics and Service Management reporting that provide visibility to stakeholders of Incident and Problem Management for VFS IT Lending
• Coordinating Problem Management and Root Cause Analysis activities to prevent and mitigate future incidents, driving the implementation and resolution of permanent solutions within the applications/servers/services
• Coordination of releases into production environments in accordance to the Change Management process and procedures, and providing oversight to ensure successful service transition
• Troubleshoot and resolve incidents and defects within service SLAs between internal IT teams and third-party vendors. 

Operational Controls and Governance 

• Ensuring necessary operational controls and governance are in place and policies to ensure alignment
• Ensuring operational requirements included in the development of new services and overseeing the service transition process of services into the production environment

Monitoring and Alerting

• Ensuring effective monitoring and alerting of VFS IT Lending services and applications
• Monitor and maintain infrastructure performance, capacity and availability, facilitating 2nd level support for the resolution of application and infrastructure-related incidents

Cybersecurity

• Manage and remediate security threats and vulnerabilities, and applying all required security controls in accordance with policy
• Ensure penetration testing findings across VFS IT Lending services are remediated within defined timeframes

DevOps Engineering

• Creation of software deployment strategies to enable successful software deployments 
• Design, build and optimize the automation of all manual tasks for developing and deploying code 
• Implementation and maintenance of continuous deployment and continuous integration frameworks
• Design and develop scaling strategies, automation scripts and solutions to implement, streamline and operate software applications 
   

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

Must have technical / professional qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, or other related field preferred
• Eight or more years’ experience in coordinating and delivering major projects and programs
• Extensive experience in managing dependencies effectively across multiple delivery teams, meeting deadlines and business outcome objectives
• Experience managing multiple vendors, and managing delivery with the vendors
• Experience with project management tools e.g. JIRA, MS Project
• Professional experience and knowledge of digital and Telecommunications industries strongly preferred

Core competencies, knowledge and experience:

• Strong knowledge of Change, Incident and Problem management strategies and processes
• Experience in effective troubleshooting techniques, incident remediation strategies and problem-solving methodologies
• DevOps principles, practices, processes, and tools
• Cloud-native architectures, including public cloud PaaS / IaaS, micro-services architectures, APIs
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to adapt to new methods and processes
• Strong relationship building, persuasion, and collaboration skills that drives internal-and cross-team constructive feedback and support
• Strong communications skills and time-management skills, with the ability manage multiple tasks
• Understanding of both the Telecommunications and Fintech technologies and services 
• Experience in monitoring technologies and application performance management tools
• Experience in managing and maintaining High-Availability, Resilience and Performance in large-scale solutions
• Experience and knowledge of ITIL and Agile methodologies and frameworks

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We make an impact by offering:

• Enticing incentive programs and competitive benefit packages
• Retirement funds, risk benefits, and medical aid benefits
• Cell phone and data benefits, advantages fiber connection discounts, and exclusive staff discounts offered in collaboration with partner companies

Closing date for Applications: 24 January 2025

The base location for this role is, Vodacom Midrand Office

The Company s approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.
Vodacom is committed to an organisational culture that recognises, appreciates and values diversity & inclusion.