About the Team:

The main role and our purpose in operations is to protect the customer experience. We do this by ensuring we understand the network topology and then engage with and support our design colleagues to provide us with adequate redundancy.

We use tried and tested methods to isolate, work around or mitigate failures in the network to ensure the customer never has a bad experience connecting or using our data/voice/messaging services. We use in-house skills to develop scripts where we feel these help in keeping the network stable and protected. We constantly strive to improve our monitoring tools, teams and methods.

As the last point of escalation before we engage our vendors – it is our role to ensure those around us, 1st and 2nd line teams and all our other operations colleagues find us approachable, competent and effective. We do whatever it takes to protect our customers experience whilst maintaining a ‘can do’ attitude and challenge where we feel appropriate.

About the Role:

To protect the revenue and brand name of VMO2 by providing 3rd Line Technical Support and 24-hour call out on a rota basis for Telco Cloud infrastructure on which all voice, data and messaging services operate.

To Lead, coordinate, manage and investigate faults escalated to the team, escalating where necessary to the equipment Vendors.

To provide workarounds and processes for 1st, 2nd level and field engineers. To manage, coach and mentor support engineers to increase their Technical and Managerial skills.

Key Responsibilities:

• Work in a small team to provide third line support for the infrastructure and applications detailed above.
• Provide On call Support 24*7 on a rota basis (1 in 4-5 weeks)
• Provide Helpdesk Support for BAU cases from 1st/2nd line during the day - on a planned rota basis
• Take responsibility, ownership and coordinate fault resolution. Work alongside a team of engineers where necessary to fix faults that are raised against the supported elements, networks or applications,
• Drive through the resolution within the agreed SLA, following the escalation process where needed.
• For service outages caused by a failure - lead the investigation into the RCA producing the required reports and co-ordinate any fix activities required to prevent further failures.
• Provide assistance to other teams to help identify root cause for failures on their supported elements. We are all one team in operations.
• Ensure all processes and procedures are documented and controlled in accordance with the VMO2 Quality process.
• As part of ongoing network improvements - identify any inadequacies with existing infrastructure and processes and propose recommendations to improve the existing infrastructure and work practices.
• To represent Mobile Data Services (MDS) in project definition workshops, platform change control, operational reviews and meetings with other departments and vendors as required.
• To advise and participate in the introduction of new network elements, applications and services, including new features - liaising as necessary with other VMO2 departments, vendors and project managers.
• To provide operational consultancy to projects, protecting the customer at all time.

Key Skills:

We are looking for outstanding individuals that can demonstrate through experience and those which seek to improve themselves and others.

• Experience in NFV/SDN solutions and cloud management including Virtualization and Cloud native platform
• VMWare Telco Cloud Platform components, namely: vCloud Director, vSphere, vCenter vRealize products (vRealize Operations, Orchestrator, Log inside and network inside), NSX-T, Telco Cloud Automation (TCA) and VMWare Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG);
• OSM (Open Source MANO)
• Arista/Cloud Vision and SDN
• Infrastructure knowledge in general (hypervisor, computing, storage, Network - physical or virtual);
• Virtualized Dell/HP servers with VMWare
• Maintain Cloud Infra availability levels to meet SLAs
• Develop and perform failover test and reporting. 

Desirable

• CNF/VNF skills such as MME, 5GSA ,
• Programming skills(Python and Juju Charms)
• Ability to manage our vendors to deliver results
• People skills
• Leading and coordinating teams of engineers whilst working on faults or projects as and when necessary
• Ability to work effectively as a member of a team as well as on self managed tasks.
• Ability to take the lead in co-ordinating restoration of a service where expertise may be required from a number of engineers from different disciplines.
• Must be able to operate in pressure and stressful situations, whilst maintaining clear and confident decision making.
• Ability to convey complex technical information, in a manner that Senior (non technical)  Management can easily interpret.
• Have a flexible approach to working hours, which will include night time and weekend work at short notice.
• The position will require an appropriate level of Security clearance as we access and use Public information under the GDPR legislation.
• Ability to mentor and technically coach other members of the team