Senior Specialist, DevOps Platform Engineer - MTN

The Senior Specialist: DevOps Cloud is responsible for the effective provisioning, operation, and monitoring of the APIs, microservices and related cloud infrastructure globally. The Senior Specialist: DevOps Cloud works within the Group Technology Digital Platforms and Services – API Services team, which is responsible for the stewardship of the MTN API Development and Application Platforms (MAD-API), which provides secure, reliable and scalable platforms and development services, in a consistent manner, to support MTN’s digital ambitions.

Using the latest tools and technologies, this role will support environments hosted within internal data centres and in the cloud, implementing solutions to:

• provision and manage environments; perform software development builds and automated testing;
• and monitor existing infrastructure. Key success factors for this role include time to market of Digital Applications, customer experience and satisfaction in line with MTN standards

MTN is entering a new phase in its lifecycle where operational and commercial excellence has become critical for success. The urgency for change has become more heightened amidst increased competitive intensity across all markets in which MTN operates. The Group’s Technology function must therefore ensure the successful delivery in context of:

• Rapidly changing ICT environment
• The geographic complexity of MTN’s foot print across Africa and the Middle East
• Management of executive and local shareholder expectations across all 22 OpCos
• Achievement of top quartile operating efficiency and effectiveness through scale and common processes
• Driving growth through business intelligence and standardization to maximize business impact
• Management of customer and supplier expectations
• Enhance MTN position as a leading network and system provider
• Constant dynamics and local challenges in the economic, regulatory and legal

Key Performance Areas: Core, essential responsibilities/outputs of the position (KPA's)

The Senior Specialist: DevOps Cloud will be accountable to achieve the following objectives:

• Plan for, implement, and efficiently operate and maintain software solutions that will increase the development teams’ software delivery and operations performance of their products and services.
• Design and implement system or solution designs to improve development, resilience and operational practices, including continuous integration, continuous deployment and the automation of manual and repetitive operations and processes.
• Architect complex, multi-faceted applications across cloud platforms
• Develop automated workflows and tooling from a system management and administration perspective. This includes, but is not limited to, capacity and availability monitoring and response, alert management and filtering, automated deployment and configuration management using best of breed applications
• Work closely with development and infrastructure teams to troubleshoot issues on the platform’s services provided; understand requirements to enhance platform services in use through automation or tools; assist with optimising and simplifying deployment; and to measure the software delivery and operational performance
• Integrate various tools in the DevOps toolchain to accelerate development teams’ velocity while maintaining high standards for quality and consistency

• Design and develop APIs / plugins / integration for tools and applications
• Assist with the design and implementation of continuous delivery and integration pipelines and automation workflows across both on-premise and public cloud solutions
• Automate parts of the development delivery process using scripts and other appropriate tools, including infrastructure provisioning and day 2 operations.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, including processes and user guides for integrated tools and scripts
• Create failure management processes and tools so outages can be handled without causing a loss of delivery
• Champion changes to tools and processes to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the development team and the availability of resiliency of technology infrastructure
• Advise on new technologies and methodologies by becoming an expert in emerging technologies and tools relevant to development operations for both on-premise and cloud solutions
• Configuration management of operating systems and applications, ensuring standards are defined and managed using the necessary tools provided (i.e. Puppet, Ansible).
• Provide 2nd tier support and expertise for the area of responsibility
• Responsible and accountable for the monitoring and alerting of the entire platform.
• Managing risk and release through configuration management, patch management, and version control (i.e. Git).
• Provide a high degree of leadership through ownership and follow through of tasks.
• Providing effort estimates on projects and prioritising own tasks effectively.
• Ensure that development and system administration follow guidelines & standards, and follow best practices.

Accountability

• Ownership of projects and problems with effective self-management.
• Responsibility for the accurate forecasting of capacity requirements across annual timeframes.
• Responsibility for the availability of services to within five 9’s.
• The architecture of highly available services and applications to serve operational requirements.
• Identification of and action on risks that could impact the security, stability or availability of services.

Key Deliverables

• Compile a digital platforms reference architecture
• Rollout of the reference architecture across all MTN Opcos

Role Dependencies

• Active support to the Senior Manager: API Development Services
• Understanding of the Group technology, business, and regulatory context
• Timely decision making and reporting
• Legacy integration governance support
• Cross work stream support and alignment
• Current knowledge of technology solutions and best practice
• Integrity and quality of legacy integration from Operating Units and programme team
• Positive working relationship with the programme work stream Principals and Leads
• Knowledge of programme streams and KPI’s

Job Requirements (Education, Experience and Competencies)

Education:

• Computer Science degree or (or similar engineering discipline) equivalent
• Strong Computer Science fundamentals
• Networking knowledge in AWS, Azure and GCP – Advantageous
• Appropriate Industry Certifications, including,
• Cloud certifications: AWS, Azure or GCP
• RHCE, LPIC (desirable)
• Hypervisor Certification i.e. VCAP / OpenStack / Cloud Stack (desirable).
• Puppet, Ansible or associated automation technology education (desirable).

Experience:

• At least 5 years of experience with software development, system architecture design and/or system integration
• At least 3 years of experience and understanding of DevOps practices and principles
• Strong operating and understanding of Linux
• Knowledge of one or more development and scripting languages

• Experience managing and configuring a Docker container environment
• Experience managing and operating a Kubernetes container orchestration environment
• Deep end-to-end understanding of the software development lifecycle, methodologies and tool chains including source control, build automation, version control, testing, code quality, deployment and release.
• Experience with Build Automation Tools, Configuration Management Tools, Continuous Integration Tools, Continuous Delivery Tools, Testing Framework Tools, Deployment Automation Tools, Continuous Monitoring Tools, Version Control Tools and Software Configuration Tools
• Experience designing, writing and executing test automation scripts using suitable test automation frameworks and tools
• System monitoring tools (ELK, Grafana, Prometheus)
• Python, Linux, Ansible, MySQL, Java, Jenkins (or similar build server)
• Experience with Lean / Agile process
• Good working knowledge of Cloud Native development practices as well as experience with implementing and deploying public cloud solutions
• Preparation of Dev, QA and Production environments using Cloud and local DC’s
• Testing of Software services (APIs) and infrastructure during deployment
• Investigating and addressing availability, performance and capacity issues.
• Managing databases (deploy, optimize, backup, configure, monitor)
• Configuration Management and functional monitoring.
• Virtualization experience
• Cloud infrastructure experience (built and managed) on any of the following: GCP, AWS, Azure – Intermediate to Advanced experience.
• Git or SVN – Advanced Experience.
• NGINX/Apache experience
• Intermediate understanding of networks and routing, VLANs, VRFs, MPSL and overlay networks
• Experience with programming languages would be advantageous, as would knowledge of unit, integration and functionality testing of software applications.
• Knowledge of and an interest in Site Reliability Engineering and the application thereof would also be advantageous, as would an interest in implementing preventative analytics, and the ability to resolve issues before they become critical or service impacting outages.

Competencies:

• Strategy Implementers, Decisive Problem Solver, Best Practice Value Creator
• Culture and Change Champion, Guiding People Manager, Relationship Builder
• Results Achiever, Operationally Astute