Head of IT Infrastructure Management at Discovery Limited

Job Purpose

The Head of IT Infrastructure Management manages the deployment, configuration, maintenance and 24/7 support of the Bank’s ICT infrastructure. This includes the physical, virtualised and cloud deployments of servers, switches, routers, storages devices, facilities (including data centres), data storage and retrieval, network systems, SQL database management and system software.

The focus of the position is to provide the highest levels of infrastructure availability, reliability, resilience, and the rapid resolution of incidents.  The Head of IT Infrastructure Management collaborates with business stakeholders together with IT systems and operations functions to ensure IT infrastructure services meet the overall needs of business and the delivery of business services. 

The position is required to directly manage an internal technical team, an outsourced team delivering basic infrastructure services as well as external vendors and service providers.  The position interfaces with various internal IT stakeholders, including application support, production operations, business systems and IT security to deliver infrastructure services for business systems.  

The position is also required to manage a growing number of cloud-delivered infrastructure services and to manage the transition of services to cloud as they are identified.

Areas of responsibility may include but are not limited to

Manage all lifecycle aspects of ICT Infrastructure from specification, acquisition, testing, deployment, maintenance, support and decommissioning of:

• physical, virtual, cloud-based server, network, storage infrastructure
• datacentre infrastructure
• server operating system configuration, maintenance, and support
• WAN, LAN and server network configuration and management
• Manage the 24/7 infrastructure support team, including external service providers, ensuring the necessary skills and competencies are scheduled and available.
• Manage outsourced infrastructure services and specifically ensure that Bank infrastructure management standards and procedures are maintained, kept up to date and complied with.
• Ensure technical components of Infrastructure meet required security policy standards at all times and the timeous performance of patch management and vulnerability remediation.
• Interface with IT stakeholders to ensure that the supporting infrastructure is maintained to meet Bank system requirements through-out their lifecycle, including structured introduction of changes in line with change and release management processes.
• Design, document, maintain and continuously improve infrastructure management processes to ensure standard and error-free operation.
• Perform routine housekeeping, root cause analyses, performance tuning and optimisation and other service improvement activities to ensure systems operate optimally.
• Monitor and project the capacity utilisation of technical infrastructure components and formulate plans for the optimisation of resources and develop plans for procurement where necessary.
• Provide support to the Programme Office during the build and introduction of new IT services and major changes to existing services.
• Provide support and services to the business continuity and disaster recovery functions in the design and configuration of recovery strategies and testing of system resilience and recovery.
• Perform all responsibilities in line with governing policies and IT service management procedures.
• Keep up to date with evolving technology trends and provide proactive advisory input to decision making.

Education and Experience

• Degree or Diploma in IT
• At least 10 years’ experience in relevant Infrastructure management and/or Technical Support roles.
• At least 5 years’ experience in a management level/role.
• Previous experience in the banking or financial services industry will be advantageous

Technical Skills or Knowledge

The ideal candidate should possess technical knowledge, and have had exposure to the management support processes covering the following:

• Networking (Datacentre, LAN and WAN)
• Operating systems (Linux, Windows)
• Virtualization (VMWare)
• Container platform management (Openshift / Kubernetes)
• Load balancer (F5)
• Cloud infrastructure management (Azure)