Job Description

Bring your possibility to life! Define your career with us

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary Apply platform engineering expertise, critical thinking, design thinking and problem solving skills in an agile team environment to produce well-organised, optimised and documented source code that successfully delivers platform features & components of the service & solves complex technical problems with high quality solutions.



Platform Engineering, Deployment & Optimisation

• Leverage platform engineering expertise & a working knowledge of specific platforms and their constituent parts to positively contribute to platform feature and service designs
• Take accountability for deeply understanding & building expertise on the platform, the platform contribution to the broader platform strategy & business and customer requirements & all available technologies
• Develop business & customer aligned, lasting & innovative platform feature sets
• Positively contribute to, define & implement the development/engineering lifecycle (end to end) and lead lifecycle improvements over successive releases.
• Produce simple, extensible, and maintainable features with very few defects. Continually works to find and fix defects.
• Leverage platform (service design & code) & engineering technical expertise to proactively identify risks and prevent defects
• Identify patterns that reveal errors and unanticipated problems, and influence telemetry analytics design decisions
• Identify & Apply metrics to drive the quality and stability of code
• Ensure consistent, usable, forward-looking, maintainable test infrastructure
• Apply object orientated design in development & draw from a large base of design patterns
• Uphold our technical principles of: self-service, scalability, re-usability, resilience & stability in all development practices and deliver feature sets that sustainably deliver on these principles
• Apply knowledge and expertise in User / Customer experience to deliver a stable user experience in all design & development that is simple, elegant, and useful.
• Proactively identify development practices that work well & leverage & improve these for future solution design and deployment
• Document feature set and constituent design information to produce solution design blueprints and validation collateral
• Based on engineering & platform expertise and a sound knowledge of the business & customer requirements consistently provide key ideas for the enhancement & optimization of the platform
• Develop & document complete designs and implement testing processes that identify and eradicate platform or service-wide problems / improve on platform performance
• Demonstrate a strong commitment to the quality & ongoing quality assurance of the product/servicexe2x80x99s in use, and take appropriate action to resolve issues throughout the lifecycle of the product or service
• Ensure alignment to platform and service release plans for effective deployment of solution designs
• Drive & implement design review processes & practices with the team & participate & positively contribute to design reviews for the feature area led by others
• Apply expertise in engineering & available technologies to enable effective review processes
• Cascade review lessons learnt for the benefit of the broader team
• Enable problem resolution across technical teams, apply and or facilitate root cause analysis, deeply understand the root causes of issues and find ways to resolve them (sustainably)
• Continuously review & find ways to optimize team processes & improve engineering quality, productivity, and team responsiveness to feedback and changing priorities
• Optimize, refactors and reuse components to improve performance and maintainability xe2x80x93 ensuring maximum efficiency, effectiveness, and return on investment
• Take accountability for maintaining platform standards and best practices, and drive adoption across multiple service teams
• Demonstrate knowledge of, identify & find required data for the ongoing monitoring & improvement of the platform feature area
• Proactively monitor the performance of the platform features & solutions
• Translate monitoring data into clearly articulated descriptions of opportunities & defects, their impact to the customer scenario and to the product or service as a whole, and the relevance to product and service targets (within scope of the job).
• Cascade and communicate these insights across the team to influence platform decision making
• Leverage production performance monitoring and customer data to make feature area technical design and implementation decisions.
• Synthesize data from multiple sources and present & define concise, impactful conclusions that influence feature teams to solve defects and meet quality targets

Financial & Cost Optimization, Risk & Governance

• Understand the platform cost model & the optimal cost : serve of the platform, use this understanding to drive the platform efficiency & effectiveness objectives
• Participate in incident management & DR activity xe2x80x93 applying critical thinking, problem solving & technical expertise to get to the bottom of major incidents
• Apply Group risk (e.g. Architecture, development, change & release etc.), governance, compliance & regulatory standards and frameworks
• Proactively identify technical risks and mitigate these (pre, during & post release)
• Update / Design all feature documentation aligned to the organization technical standards and risk / governance frameworks

People

• Proactively & effectively (time & quality) collaborate & drive collaboration on features across feature team (e.g. managing dependencies & interdependencies, conflict resolution, information & best practice sharing, problem resolution outside of own area etc.)
• Apply collaboration skills in development practices & issue resolution regardless of team boundaries & lead communication with relevant stakeholders through to conclusion
• Contribute to a high performance team environment & culture as a high performing member of a self-directed team aligned to agile working
• Leverage coaching techniques in all team related activity to drive a higher quality service, design and deployment of technical solutions.
• Proactively seek & provide feedback across a range of stakeholders for the benefit of the team & leverage feedback to consistently improve platform solution delivery
• Coach & mentor other engineers & support engineering teams on technical solutions and problem resolution & proactively seek coaching & mentoring from others
• Participate in peer reviews, testing, problem solving within and across the broader team
• Cascade platform performance feedback and ensure capability development across teams to enable efficient & effective platform service delivery
• Drive the design of content, tools & materials for strategy alignment, education & adoption processes to be applied across stakeholder groups

Experience Required:

• Design, build, assemble, and configure application or technical architecture components using business requirements.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka clusters hosted on AWS and on-prem
• Experience in building Kafka pipelines using Terraform, Ansible, Cloud formation templates, shells etc.
• Experience in implementing security & authorization (permission based) on Kafka cluster.
• Aid System Administrators with setting up Kafka platform in provisioning, access lists Kerberos and SSL configurations.
• Experience in setting standards to automate deployments using Kubernetes, Docker, Chef or Jenkins
• Experience in open source and confluence Kafka, zookeepers, Kafka connect, schema registry, KSQL, Rest proxy and Kafka Control center.
• Experience in Kafka Mirror Maker or Confluent Replicator
• Experience in High availability cluster setup, maintenance and ongoing support
• Establish best practice standards for configuring Source and Sink connectors.
• Hands on experience in standing up and administrating Kafka platform from scratch which includes creating a backup & mirroring of Kafka Cluster brokers, broker sizing, topic sizing, h/w sizing, performance monitoring, broker security, topic security, consumer/producer access management (ACL)
• Knowledge of Kafka API (development experience is a plus)
• Knowledge of best practices related to security, performance, and disaster recovery.
• Ability to concentrate on a wide range of loosely defined complex situations, which require creativity and originality, where guidance and counsel may be unavailable.
• Demonstrate a product mindset with an ability to set forward thinking and direction.
• Ability to synthesize large amounts of complex data into meaningful conclusions and present recommendations.
• Ability to maintain a positive attitude while working with high demands and short deadlines that leads to working after hours.
• Must have excellent communications and interpersonal skills

Education

Bachelor's Degree: Information Technology

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised

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