Live Services Specialist at Sage

The Live Services DevOps teams are Responsible and Accountable for Sage’s online Product portfolio. The teams ensure our Products and Services are constantly available for our customers to use to run their businesses. The Live Services DevOps Specialist is responsible for ensuring their Products and Services remains available, secure and performant. Using cutting-edge technology, the Live Service Specialist ensures their services are designed and deployed to be best in class.

To do this, our Live Services Specialists have an excellent understanding of cloud technologies and ability to compare different cloud offerings. The specialist works closely with product delivery teams by deploying, administering, monitoring and improving their services, using standard operational processes capabilities; including disaster recovery, high system availability, on-demand scalable solutions, infrastructure monitoring, continuous deployment capabilities, etc. Using guidance from Security and Architecture teams, the LSM team deliver the Security IT Control Matrix, build new services always using the latest technology, build in Automation and CI/CD, streamline processes across teams and administer new systems.

Innovation & Automation are built into everything you do. You have responsibility to ensure systems remain current; all vulnerabilities constantly reviewed and addressed; systems upgraded and re-architected regularly and keep abreast of new technologies. You understand operational risk and are Accountable for delivering an excellent service to our customers. The Live Services Specialist is Confident in a dynamic environment, co-ordinating large projects, communicating well, and exercising initiative when presented with problems. Prioritisation of workload is key, alongside the ability to work as part of a global team, contributing and influencing various teams globally. You need the ability to run Incidents and recognise your interaction with our Products, Services and Customers has a direct impact on how we perform as a business (what 'good' looks like). This is a 24/7 operation that requires on call coverage from each specialist to problem solve any service incidents that may arise. With your depth of experience, you participate as an active member of the global LSM team, regularly interacting with other teams, introducing new technologies and automation, participating in knowledgeshares so the knowledge is shared across the team. All of the above requires excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills.

Key Responsibilities

• Take personal accountability for their products so that they remain available, secure and performant ensuring Customers For Life
• Create, maintain, administer and enhance cloud environments, ensuring they are secure and scalable to satisfy operational, governance, product and customer needs.
• Monitor applications and systems, proactively identifying issues and mitigating them to improve the customer experience
• Use technology and knowledge to design and implement solutions and services to simplify customer experience, mitigate risk, improve usability and to impact Sage’s goals
• Perform ‘code’ and ‘code/infrastructure’ deployments
• Ensure that any key non-functional requirements around availability, security and performance are met before any product is made available to customers.
• Defining key metrics/logging and implement tooling that will provide all key stakeholders with information that will help identify improvements to the service on behalf of the customer.
• This role will require you get to know the development team’s world (source control, builds, backlogs, sprints, Agile etc) but also to bring the development team closer to the operational team's world (Infrastructure, OS, security, scripting, monitoring etc) working in a true DevOps role
• The promotion of a DevOps culture and adoption of CI/CD principles throughout the organization
• Keeping abreast of latest cloud technologies and driving relevant adoption across the global team to improve services. Change business processes to gain efficiencies and improve customer experience
• Enable continuous deployment cycles and on-demand deployment processes
• Closely co-ordinate with product delivery teams to ensure that designs, standards and quality can be implemented improving the customer experience
• Take the lead during high pressure incident scenarios, balancing technical resolution and senior stakeholder communications.
• Communicate with key stakeholders on planned changes, incidents and service improvement plans, influencing decisions on Product roadmaps
• Maintain Configuration Management DB for key services.
• Operate to ISO standards and document all processes
• Improve the out of hours customer experience by participating in our 24x7 on-call rota