
Specialist Platform Engineer
- Sandton, Johannesburg
- Permanent
- Full-time
- 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/service’s 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 – 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.
- Understand the log ingestion framework environment (Cribl).
- Maintain Cribl environment, including ingestion configuration, onboarding new clients and maintaining agent health.
- Engagements with ingestion clients to assist with onboarding.
- Consult on log ingestion best practices.
- Work with the Data engineering team to best analyse logs and observability data.
- Work on the Data engineering platforms to achieve the log ingestion framework objectives.
- Promote Functions technology observability strategy and objectives.
- 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 – 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.
- 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.