Windows SRE Engineer

Role: Windows SRE Engineer

Location: Remote within UK (except London - where Local to London needs to be on-site 5 days a week)

Full Time Employment - initial 6 months Contract

Inside IR35 via Umbrella

CLIENT

Site Reliability Engineering are responsible for delivering continuous improvement, automation and self-service offerings to operational teams across Bank EMEA and Securities International.

The main purpose of the role:

• Responsible for the reliability and efficiency of infrastructure through the delivery of common, repeatable tools and processes that greatly reduce the amount of toil operations must perform
• Member of L3 Engineering team providing subject matter expertise and ultimate escalation

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Primary:

• Develop software to make infrastructure services self-managing and self-service
• Deliver continuous service improvement by developing Infrastructure as Code
• Eliminate manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical tasks that are devoid from value
• Improve system performance, make effective use of resources, distribute load and reduce latency
• Identify SLO’s (Service Level Objectives) to meet availability and latency objectives
• Develop pro-active monitoring solutions that alert on symptoms and not just on outages
• Perform detailed root cause analysis (RCA’s) on incidents and outages to prevent future
• Partner with development teams to improve services via rigorous testing and release procedures
• Identify technical debt and partner with application teams to build remediation plans
• Develop standard operational procedures and produce effective documentation
• Analyse workloads and devise suitable cloud migration strategies where appropriate
• Ensure all project / investment workloads are delivered according to plans and budget defined
• Liaise with Infrastructure Control and IT Risk teams to satisfy internal and external audit requests
• Deputise for team lead when required to do so and act-up accordingly
• Identify cost saving and optimisation opportunities across the group
• Build strong working relationships across the organisation
• Adhere to the core values of the bank

Secondary:

• Perform daily health and compliance checks for all systems as required
• Ensure all systems are backed up successfully and any issues are promptly resolved
• Validate monitoring alerts and batch job failures are detected promptly and satisfactorily resolved
• Ensure sufficient capacity is available to accommodate drive growth
• Respond to emails sent to the team distribution list / mailboxes in a timely manner
• Handle incidents and requests with efficiency and a “customer first” mindset
• Maintain infrastructure in a highly available, reliable, secure and performant manner
• General Server / Database / Virtualisation Administration maintenance activities
• Provide technical support to application support and development teams
• Provide consultancy to application support and development teams
• Take part in On-Call & weekend work rotation; triaging and addressing production issues as they arise

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Essential:

• Exceptional skills in Microsoft Windows Server internals and related technologies
• Excellent skills in managing and maintaining Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, LDAP and Kerberos
• Extensive experience in hardware performance monitoring and tuning complex low latency systems.
• Agile, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps Principles and practices
• Exceptional knowledge of scripting and programming languages such as PowerShell, Python and C#
• Fluent in Backup and Recovery processes and procedures
• Advanced knowledge of Clustering, High-Availability, Replication and Disaster Recovery techniques
• Ability to tune Network, Storage, Server and Virtualisation layers for optimal performance and reliability
• Excellent Performance Tuning skills, in-depth knowledge of system internals, performance counters and performance measurement and analysis tools.
• Ability to interpret and implement CIS security hardening recommendations in a controlled manner
• Acute awareness of Security and Auditing requirements in a regulated environment
• “Infrastructure as Code” Principles and practices.
• “Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Development (CD)” Principles and practices
• Git, Ansible, Terraform and TeamCity
• Serena Deployment Automation (SDA) and Jenkins

Highly Desirable:

• Experience on writing, managing plays/playbooks on AWX / Ansible Tower
• Advance working knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker container orchestration
• Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase ASE, MongoDB and Snowflake
• IBM Tivoli / Netcool
• Nutanix HCI and VMWare ESX
• Networking Protocols (TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLAN’s)
• RHEL, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris and related technologies
• Cloud computing - IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings across Azure, AWS, GCP and Oracle
• Knowledge of data security governance and regulations such as GDPR and SOX

Desirable:

• Dell EMC PowerStore (SAN) and Isilon (NAS)
• Rubrik, EMC Networker, Data Domain and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
• CyberArk
• Splunk
• Qualys
• Cisco Tetration
• ServiceNow
• JIRA and Confluence