Platform & Infrastructure Engineer - Remote/Milton Keynes -6 months
Role: Platform & Infrastructure Engineer
Location: Milton Keynes
Duration: 6 months
About the client :
Our client are one of the largest financial institutions automotive financial institutions in the UK.
PRIMARY PURPOSE OF THE JOB
The Platform & Infrastructure Engineer is responsible for providing support, maintenance and enhancement of the Clients server and network infrastructure within the UK as well as managing the complex middleware environments on all UK, HQ & Cloud hosted systems
MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES
- Responsible for the management, maintenance and support of 196 UK based on-premise servers to ensure core business applications run on stable, highly available and technically secure infrastructure.
- Responsible for the management, maintenance and support of all UK hosted core infrastructure systems (Exchange, SQL, Hyper-V, VMware, Active Directory, Pure Storage SAN, File Services) in order to ensure business resilience, application functionality and platform security
- Responsible for the security, system stability, capacity planning & lifecycle management of IT systems within Client to ensure that IT services are successfully delivered to the business in line with availability, performance, lifespan requirements and SLA's
- Responsible for maintenance & support of all middleware on HQ hosted UK application servers to ensure application stability and security vulnerabilities are remediated within Risk appetite guidelines.
- Perform hands-on security threat modelling, risk assessment, and vulnerability remediation in order to ensure the integrity of the IT security and to ensure Internal Audit/Governance security objectives are achieved
- Responsible for technical remediation of all 3rd line server related incidents, aligned to defined targets and KPIs to ensure that service impact to the business is minimised
- Responsible for undertaking complex root cause analysis and remediation of all major incidents or recurring incidents through the internal Problem Management process to ensure that they do not re-occur in order to maximise business resiliency
- Assist the Cloud Platform Team (Cloud Centre of Competence) with the strategic development of the UK cloud platform
- Responsible for the resolution of CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) alerts, security audit points and penetration test findings in line with SLA's and Internal Audit/Governance requirements in order to ensure the security integrity of the UK IT infrastructure and maintenance of our core data assets
- Provide technical SME support and knowledge to deliver key enterprise strategic infrastructure projects and independently manage smaller Infrastructure level projects to time and on budget (including the planning, preparation and implementation).
- Work collaboratively with the UK Architecture Team to assist with the technical design, planning and implementation of new systems to ensure that the business availability, redundancy, compliance, capacity & growth objectives are met
- Assist the IT Service Continuity Manager in planning, implementing and documenting disaster recovery exercises to ensure that real-world scenarios can be managed in a controlled manner and services to the business and our customers can be restored in the most effective and timely manner
- As a subject matter expert, support, guide and mentor colleagues to ensure that appropriate levels of skill are maintained and shared throughout the team to avoid any single points of failure
- Assist the IT Infrastructure Manager & Platform & Infrastructure Lead with the strategic development of the server and network infrastructure
- Assist the IT Infrastructure Manager & Platform & Infrastructure Lead with budget planning to ensure existing & new solutions are appropriately funded
- Deputise for the Platform & Infrastructure Lead in their absence
MANDATORY
- Microsoft Windows Server (up to and including Windows Server 2021)
- Microsoft Active Directory Services including Group Policy Management
- Microsoft Exchange administration 2016
- Microsoft SQL 2014 administration onwards
- Server virtualisation technologies (VMware ESXi and/or Hyper-V)
- Backup & archiving technologies (preferably CommVault)
- Solid understanding of networking technologies/protocols in physical and virtual environments including DNS, TCP/IP, iSCSI, fibre channel
- Strong understanding of IT security principles and best practices including securing data in transit and at rest
- Server & network infrastructure support experience focusing on problem diagnostics & resolution
- Understanding of capacity planning
- Knowledge & experience of high availability systems, designs & implementation options to provide the most cost effective resilient solution to the business
- Knowledge & experience of disaster recovery planning and service continuity
- Project Management
DESIRABLE
- Veritas Enterprise Vault v12.0 onwards
- Storage Area Networks (ideally including Brocade fibre channel networking and & Pure Storage technologies)
- HPE server hardware & blade centres
- High availability technologies including Microsoft Cluster Services & SAN metro clusters
- APC UPS & PDU and Data Center Expert Management software
- Anti-Virus/Malware (preferably McAfee EPO and Trend ScanMail suite)
- Microsoft System Center Operations Manager & Configuration Manager
- Microsoft Windows desktop operating systems and office applications
- Experience of disaster recovery and business continuity planning is highly valued
- Experiencing of scripting in PowerShell, T-SQL, Visual Basic, Bash, Python Go
- Knowledge of containers and their orchestration (i.e. Kubernetes)
- Knowledge of cloud based environments, e.g. one of AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
