Lead Engineer

Key Accountabilities

• Provide a Fanatical Experience™ to Rackspace employees and customers
• Act as a consultative resource for customers to assist them in achieving their business objectives
• Pro-actively seek opportunities to improve customer’s solution architecture and operations
• Pro-actively seek opportunities to solve customer business objectives with the wide and diverse Rackspace product portfolio
• Support Customers and Rackspace Programme and Project Managers in delivering strategic programmes such as Transformation/Modernisation
• Ensure appropriate technical documentation is in place for customer solutions
• Provide strategic and operational guidance that will allow customers to continually optimise their environments to achieve their business goals
• Drive strong customer satisfaction (NPS) through opinionated advice and guidance
• Own issues, and escalations and drive collaboration with other teams to find speedy resolutions

Person Attributes

• Customer obsessed – works vigorously to earn and keep customers trust, and an ability to continually anticipate and meet their needs
• A blend of commercial and operational acumen
• Experience in owning of account planning activities, service improvement or business development activity
• Versatile and able to thrive in a frequently changing customer service environment
• Operates well working with technical and non-technical employees and very comfortable with autonomy
• Experience of influencing and presenting to external customers
• Ability to meet challenging targets within tight deadlines
• Understanding of Service Management best practices frameworks such as ITIL
• Exposure to operational management within a critical environment
• Effective troubleshooting and analytical skills and ability to manage complex and technical projects
• Ability to collaborate with and manage diverse cross functional teams for successful customer outcomes borne out of a “can do” attitude and proactive outlook
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills coupled with the ability to develop rapport and relationships at a variety of (external and internal) customer stakeholder levels
• Strong customer focus, with an ability to continually anticipate and meet their needs

Technical Capabilities (Required)

• Experience in architecting and managing production environments across Physical, Virtualised and Cloud technologies with a focus on Microsoft Azure
• Experience delivering outcomes for UK Sovereign or UK Government customers
• Experience of hosting web applications across a variety of Microsoft products
• Experience of transformation and migrations from traditional VMware Virtualisation to Microsoft Azure
• A good understanding of Microsoft technologies. Windows Server, Active Directory, IIS, SQL
• Experience configuring and troubleshooting high availability solutions, Microsoft Windows and SQL Clustering and load-balanced Web Farms
• A good understanding of Enterprise class Networking, Virtualisation and Storage technologies
• A good understanding of security practices and tooling

Desirable skills

• Industry qualifications from Microsoft, VMware, Cisco highly desirable
• Experience of Windows and SQL Clustering
• Understanding of Linux Kernel or related operating systems highly beneficial
• DevOps methodologies understanding
• Scripting skills in Python, PowerShell or other versatile scripting language is desirable
• Working knowledge of common hosted web and database technologies
• Understanding for agile software development methodologies and languages
• Experience in planning and delivering End of Life upgrade programmes
• Horizontal and vertical scaling knowledge within Private and or Public clouds
• Basic knowledge in monitoring (Graphite, Logstash, Zabbix, Nagios, SCCM, SolarWinds etc.)
• Public Cloud certifications in relevant fields