Senior Technical Architect – Citrix, VMware recruitment

Job ID: 21255

Position Description:
SunGard provides solutions for the insurance industry in each of the following major business lines: life and health, annuities and pensions, property and casualty, reinsurance and asset management. SunGard's software and services support functions from the front-office through the back-office, from customer service, policy administration and actuarial calculations to financial and investment accounting and reporting.
• Complete responsibility for the architecture of PMHS. The Senior Technical Architect will be responsible for the design and configuration of the entire managed service infrastructure
• Act as the point of escalation from the offshore and onshore Service Desk and 2nd/3rd line teams for technical support issues within PMHS
• PMHS is designed to make the best use of any and all architectural elements. The Senior Technical Architect will be responsible for ensuring the client facing environment remains high performance, resilient and scalable as well as forecasting future growth to support the clients and the growing PMHS business
• Support sales related work in terms of sales collateral, service agreements and contracts; this will be in the form of providing technical input ensuring that there is engagement into the sales process
• Build relationships with Product Management, Development and strategy teams to participate in the production of the roadmap for iWorks products and define and document the roadmap for PMHS
• Provide subject matter expertise and best practice guidance, internally and to clients, on industry standards, 3rd party products, including but not exclusively Microsoft's HPC 2008, Microsoft's Windows 2008, IIS, Microsoft SQL 2008, SAN, NAS, NetApp, Citrix, VMware
• Actively work with the Service Desk to proceduralise operations for new and upgraded infrastructure
• Design and implement Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery controls and procedures to ensure continuity of service following a disaster in the production environments
• Ensure change management processes are followed by the all employees when implementing change on the production environment and chair the Change Advisory Board
• Take ownership for the content and maintenance of the architectural blueprint for PMHS. The Senior Technical Architect will be responsible for ensuring the infrastructure is built and maintained in accordance with the blueprint
• Attend industry seminars and SunGard customer events when necessary
• Domestic and international travel to client sites will be required in a pre and post sales capacity. Travel will also be required to development and support centres in India and other countries
• Work with 3rd party vendors and consultants for design and support of the managed hosted environment
• As part of the support process it is expected that the successful candidate will be expected to input sufficient time and effort to restoring the managed service back to full operation when necessary. This may involve working out of core business hours and being on call for extended support
• Planning and management of infrastructure delivery projects, working with various teams throughout the organisation to deliver the projects

Position Requirements:
Knowledge/Experience:

Essential Experience Required;
• A business professional with substantial experience in product support environment
• Client facing exposure in a related role
• Strategic planning
• Project management experience

Desirable Experience Required;
• Worked with Product Management and Development groups on product roadmaps
• Designed and implemented managed services environments
• A background in System Administration experience would be a distinct advantage

Skills:

Essential Skills Required;
• Wide breadth of knowledge on IT Infrastructure and networking
• Knowledge of at least one but preferably both of CITRIX and VMware
• Good written and verbal communications at all levels
• Professional, customer focused, diligent, an eye for detail and a consistent approach
• Complex problem solving
• Ability to communicate complex technical issues to business focused teams and to take a business requirement and build a technical solution to support the need
• Ability to work autonomously and as part of a team depending on the nature of the work

Desirable Skills Required;
• Knowledge of Microsoft Server based software stack(Windows, SQL, etc)
• Hands on or conceptual understanding of grid processing, cloud and big data.
• Knowledge of networking concepts (including firewall design and principals, Load balancing, clustered storage)
• Active Directory, Powershell Scripting and SMTP mailing.

Competencies:

The successful candidate will need to be highly structured as well as creative in the design and support of the service. The Service is mission critical to SunGard's clients but will push the technology to its limits so a balance between reliability and leading edge must be struck.

The Architect must also demonstrate the following competencies
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Customer Focus
• Business and Professional Conduct
• Technical Expertise