Private Cloud Engineer Full-Time

Role purpose

Vodacom is looking for a Private Cloud Engineer to join the Technology Operations area. This role will be responsible for daily operations, maintenance, and support of the organization private cloud infrastructure. The role is focused on ensuring the availability, performance, stability, optimization and security of the private cloud infrastructure and related services, as well as helping to drive improvements and enhancements at scale while automating processes and works closely with various IT teams to support business objectives.

The ideal candidate must have extensive experience with VMware technologies and a strong background in virtualization and infrastructure management.

Key accountabilities and decision ownership

• Manage and maintain the private cloud virtual infrastructure and services, ensuring high availability, performance, and scalability through SLO’s and CI/CD enforcement.
• Work closely with Planning/Delivery teams to ensure that Infrastructure platforms and services are designed with “operability” in mind.
• Perform regular monitoring of health, performance and capacity of VMware infrastructure, including but not limited to: vSphere, vCenter, ESXI hosts, virtual machines, to identify and address bottlenecks and areas for improvements.
• Optimize private cloud resources to improve performance and reduce costs.
• Ensure configurations are aligned to best practices and compliant with organizational security guidelines and industry standards.
• Plan, schedule, and execute all regular maintenance changes, and lifecycle management of the virtual infrastructure.
• Participate in on-call rotation for after-hours support.
• Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to troubleshoot and resolve issues and incidents including performance problems and system outages and support integrations with other systems/services.
• Conduct post-mortems and escalate issues to vendors/suppliers support as needed according to an appropriate Service Level Agreement.
• Provide technical support for service requests related to VMware infrastructure and associated services.
• Develop workflows, scripts and implement solutions to enhance monitoring, operation, maintenance and troubleshooting tasks, automate repetitive tasks and streamline operations to improve efficiency.
• Maintain comprehensive and accurate documentation of private cloud HLD/LLD, configurations and procedures.
• Ensure accurate reports on private cloud capacity, performance, and incidents.
• Maintain accurate inventory of private cloud assets and VMware based platforms.
• Participate in system design consulting, platform management, and capacity planning.

Core competencies, knowledge and experience

• Deep understanding of cloud architecture, virtualization and cloud native platforms.
• Experience with VMware based environments: vSphere, vCenter, ESXI, VMware Aria Suite (Operations, Automation, Operations for logs, Operations for Networks). Experience with NSX/NSX-T is a plus.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud is a plus.
• Strong problem-solving, organizational, and analytical skills.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Experience with general performance tuning and optimization of VMware based platforms and services.
• Experience with container management platforms (Kubernetes).
• Familiar with CI/CD principles and tools, and with automation and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible pipelines and similar).
• Understand monitoring and performance metrics to ensure availability and performance of private cloud environment.
• Knowledge of ITIL practices and methodologies.
• Experience with troubleshooting complex infrastructure issues, identify the root cause, and develop effective solutions.

Must have technical/professional qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, IT or related field.
• VMware Certified Professional (VCP) or higher certification.
• 5+ years of experience in IT operations, with a minimum of 3 years focused on virtualized cloud infrastructure.
• Strong experience with VMware based virtualization technologies and services: vSphere, vCenter, ESXI, VMware Aria Suite (Operations, Automation, Operations for logs, Operations for Networks) and related technologies.
• Proficiency in cloud management and monitoring platforms and tools.

Key performance indicators

• Availability (SLOs, SLIs), performance, and compliance levels.
• Incident management (number of incidents and MTTx metrics).
• Change failure rate.
• Proactive monitoring and alerting.
• Customer satisfaction.
• Capacity planning and optimization.
• Automation and efficiency initiatives.