Senior Cloud Operations Engineer (VMware)

Your Role

The role of Cloud Platform Operations Engineer (VMware) is part of the Operations team in our Cloud Centre of Excellence. The Cloud Centre of Excellence is a cross-functional team responsible for developing and managing the cloud strategy, governance, and best practices that the rest of the organization can leverage to transform the business using the cloud.  

In this role, you join a team of highly skilled Operations Engineers responsible for the end-to-end ownership and delivery of private cloud services. The Cloud Platform Operations Engineer (VMware) will be responsible for enabling and maximizing our ability to exploit cloud for business benefits, while ensuring customer satisfaction, cost effectiveness, operational integrity and adherence to relevant industry best practices. You will be provided with guidance and training to facilitate your development within this role including opportunities to cross train to public Cloud.

Your Responsibilities

Solution Governance

• Work closely with the Business Projects and Application Development community to ensure requirements are understood and advice can be given in line with implementing the right workload into the Private Cloud.
• Work closely with internal and external partner functions to ensure that the Private Cloud Architecture meets with industry best practices.
• Review new strategic major initiatives to ensure that maximum use is made of standardised solutions and that all infrastructure is cost effective and fit for purpose.
• Regularly review the platform and recommend improvements, as necessary, to promote optimal use and ensure that the Private Cloud offering is in line with industry best practice
• Engage with local project teams to support and provide SME input to the running of services ensuring that the Utility infrastructure is optimised
• Provide administrative services to the platform, provisioning, patching etc…
• Review and continually improve the end-to-end engagement model for cloud services
• Develop the dev ops strategy in line with the optimized use of the cloud technology
   

Consultancy & Best Practice

• Provide consultancy support to ICC partners, as appropriate, to promote the use of shared resources and common solutions.
• Develop best practice material for regular dissemination within the Zurich business.
• Regularly review and propose improvements to operational processes & procedures.

Operational Support & Supplier Management

• Actively drive service delivery improvements with external partners/suppliers based on project and operational run requirements.
• Provide out of hours on-call support for production and development environments
• Be the subject matter expert on infrastructure elements in the cloud. For example:
  • Compute
  • Storage
  • Networking
  • Database
  • Supporting Services such as DNS, DHCP, PKI etc.

• Design, build and implement tools to aid observability, identification and resolution of incidents that occur on the cloud platform with a strong emphasis on reducing MTTR
• Provide backup and recovery support and guidance for cloud resources.  This includes executing disaster recovery procedures to support disaster recovery testing.
• Participate in security incident response and investigation as needed 
   

Collaboration

• Continually promote active collaboration amongst all parties globally. Act as a conduit for new ideas and concepts that could be beneficial to the Zurich businesses.
• Provide support and expertise to troubleshoot issues on the Cloud Platform or hosted Workloads, escalating to other specialised teams as required.
• Contribute to incident root cause analysis, with enough knowledgeable to lead discussions and drive tangible improvements
• Work with peers inside and outside the team to promote and expand automation of operational tasks through consultancy and hands-on expertise, identifying the best fit and highlighting benefits
• Be a point of contact for key ITIL processes that impact the Cloud Platform and hosted Workloads, providing and advice and guidance on how to implement the various requirements in a cloud-first way

Your Skills and Qualifications

Required:

• 5+ years’ experience in Cloud Operations
• Experience of managing private cloud technologies in a large-scale enterprise environment.
• Relevant degree or diploma programme of study.
• Experience of working with the latest automation tools in a DevOps and Agile environment.
• Troubleshooting experience in virtual/ cloud infrastructures
• Proven experience of working within supplier-led service delivery models
• Proven ability to succeed in collaborative work environments using Agile/Scrum methodologies.

Technical Skills:

• An in-depth working knowledge of private Cloud technologies
• Must have Experience with Virtualisation / Hypervisors using VMware vSphere 7, vSAN, ESXi
• Experience with Hybrid HCI and CI Platforms
• Experience with SDS Systems and Physical Storage Systems
• Experience with Physical and Virtual Networking
• Experience with Backup Systems for Virtual Environments
• Experience of Cross Platform and Hybrid Platform VM migrations
• Experience of employing DevOps is seen as an advantage
• Structured Analytical skills with the ability to work under pressure
• Time Management, diligent, proactive working style
• Technical Authoring
• Solution engineering and system implementation
• Systems monitoring concepts and tools
• Load & Performance testing
• Capacity Management
• Quality management and process improvement
• A working knowledge of IT Finance
• Sound knowledge of Productivity and Reporting toolsets (e.g., Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio)
• Project Management experience is seen as an advantage