Senior Cloud Systems Administrator

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Business: emap Publishing  part of Metropolis International
• Base Location: Croydon or Fleet Street/Hybrid ( 3 days from home, 2 days in the office)
• Employment Type: Full time. 6 Months Contract, Maternity Cover from 1^st September 2023 to 29^th March 2024
• Salary: £ competitive
• Visa sponsorship or remote working are not available

 

Trading as emap for its B2B division, Metropolis International is a fast-growing business, privately owned Media Group with over £50m of annual revenue, structured in two divisions – consumer media, and business-to-business media. In both parts of the business, we run print magazines, digital content and both face-to-face and virtual awards, conferences and other events. Metropolis is actively looking at acquiring more media businesses. We employ over 480  people in offices in West London, Croydon, Fleet street, Devon and Dublin.

Overall Purpose of the Role:

The Cloud Systems Administrator role is responsible for managing Metropolis/emap’s public cloud systems on AWS, working closely and collaboratively with our web developers to develop and maintain deployment, monitor, tune, report, secure and the life-cycle management solutions for our hosted environments.

Our DevOps team builds and maintains our next generation micro service API’s, WordPress management plugins, performance monitoring platform and systems automation tools around Amazon Web Services, therefore, the successful candidate must have a minimum of 3 years’ experience maintaining large AWS based SaaS solutions to be considered for this position.

Responsibilities:

• Daily administration and support of Metropolis/emap’s various hosting and infrastructure environments
• Deploying, automating, maintaining, and managing AWS cloud-based production systems, to ensure the availability, performance, scalability, and security of these systems.
• Managing EC2 lunch configurations and autoscaling groups using a broad range of AWS technologies
• Continuous improvement for technology and processes for our SaaS environments
• Performing backup operations, ensuring all required file systems and system data are successfully backed up to the appropriate media or location.
• Auditing data backups for accuracy, testing restore capabilities, have the responsibility for customer data redundancy.
• Configure and fine tune cloud infrastructure systems and virtual cloud instances.
• Work with suppliers and other third-party for daily administrations of our various hosting environments and assessing new solutions and migration during acquisitions.
• Implementing infrastructure enhancements to improve the reliability and performance of systems.
• Conducting routine audits of infrastructure to ensure compliance with established standards, policies, configuration, and security guidelines.
• React to, act on, and manage incoming requests and monitoring alarms, prioritising according to business needs.
• React to, act on requests for creation and management of all event websites, including troubleshooting and managing CNAMES
• Support daily server and network operations including server patching, upgrades, and deployments.
• Ensuring long-term requirements of systems operations and administration are identified and submitted for considerations to IT senior managers.

Key Results Areas:

• Support and maintain the service infrastructure with appropriate security and privacy controls and meets users’ needs.
• Provide documentation and training materials to ensure knowledge retention.
• Provide advice and assurance about the work of junior colleagues.
• Deliver new functionality to service platforms, with an emphasis on platform independence, automation, and cost-benefit optimisation.
• Ensure that governance rules, particularly security standards are always upheld.
• Ensure maximum uptime / availability of the AWS environment.
• Monitors and communicates system performance metrics and works with internal staff and 3rd party vendors to resolve any issues.

Personal Specifications and Competencies:

Interpersonal Skills:

• Strong influencing skills with the ability to influence and negotiate for time and resources at all levels.
• Evidence of success in building and managing relationships with high level stakeholders.
• Organisational awareness with the ability to operate with confidence and credibility across all functions of the Company.

IT, Administrative and Organisational Skills:

• Experience with security controls i.e. VPNs, encryption & key/certificate management, endpoint protection, virtual firewalls/ACLs/NSGs, setting up bastion nodes, etc
• Experience connecting cloud infrastructure to on-prem networks (VPNs, tunnelling, AD connectors, routing)
• Experience in architecture/engineering of cloud-based distribution systems
• Background in Distributed Systems, Databases, Security, Networking & Load Balancing, Monitoring, Scripting & Automation
• Excellent planning, organisational and time management skills, with the ability to work under pressure and to tight deadlines and to demonstrate an effective and resourceful approach to addressing issues.

Judgement and Analysis:

• Sound judgement with the ability to interpret, analyse and disseminate complex, technical information.
• Must be able to make excellent strategic decisions for the design and build of services to AWS, evaluating the likely impact of alternative approaches, referring to software requirements, input from the Development leads and the existing source code base. Decision making in this role will have an impact on service availability, security, speed, team productivity and customer support. Therefore, personal judgement needs to be exercised in determining a course of action.

Initiative:

• Resourceful and purposeful, with initiative, drive and a strong desire to deliver exceptional results.
• Able to work autonomously through a wide variety of complex problems under own initiative, adopting system administration principles of networking & system administration required for robust, secure and scalable solutions.
• A team player both internally and externally.

Communication skills:

• Able to write technical software design specifications.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical terminology to non-technical people.
• Ensure configuration changes are well documented to assist in future maintenance.

Other Special Requirements:

Necessary education/qualifications:

• 3-5 years’ experience with using a broad range of AWS technologies to develop and maintain an AWS based cloud solution, with an emphasis on best practice cloud security.
• 3-5 years’ experience administering both Linux and Microsoft cloud-based environments and respective hosted application(s) is an advantage.
• AWS Certification, such as AWS Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator or DevOps Engineer, is a major asset
• 3-5 years’ experience with fundamental internet protocols such as DNS, HTTP(S) TCP/IP networks, routers, firewalls DNS, DHCP and Load Balancing
• Solid experience as a DevOps Engineer in a 24×7 uptime Amazon AWS environment, including automation experience with configuration management tools.
• Experience working with common DevOps tools, such as, Consul, Splunk and Ansible
• Experience in Build and Code Deployment functions via Jenkins and Gitlab
• Solid experience in Database Administration and strong understanding of Cloud native DBs (AWS Aurora, DynamoDB, etc).
• Experience with system health monitoring and optimising performance.
• Experience with threat modelling, especially for web application and web APIs
• Ability to analyse and resolve complex infrastructure resource and application deployment issues.
• Knowledge of software containerisation platforms like Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.
• Experience installing, configuring, architecting, and managing website CMS’s for high availability using varnish caching in both a Windows and Linux environment

Desired Skills (Not essential but beneficial to have):

• Experience scripting or developing in at least one of the following languages: Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, .NET etc
• Experience with Agile software development, project management methodologies and tools.
• Experience supporting the Content Management Systems for example: WordPress
• Experience administrating version control systems such as SVN and GIT.

Learning & Development:

 At emap, we believe that employee learning and development are the key drivers of our success. To ensure continuous growth and meet the ever-changing demands of the workplace, we provide an environment that fosters continuous development for our employees.

Our employees are encouraged to identify their areas of personal and professional development aligned with our strategic areas, including management development, health, safety & wellbeing, sales, events management, marketing strategy, editorial, and information technology. We have a structured framework designed to help equip our employees with the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to excel in their job roles, contributing to achieving our organizational objectives.

To support our employees’ career development, we have designed specialized programs, as well as other stand-alone role-specific and generic courses, under the emap academy.

 

This exciting position is a full-time hybrid role. 2 days in the office, 3 days from home. This could change over time depending on business needs.

  Benefits: emap is part of Metropolis Group. Together we are committed to providing a happy and healthy place to work, so we offer fantastic benefits and perks to our employees.

• 25 days of holiday per year (with the option to buy or sell)
• Health plan
• Life assurance
• Cycle-to-work scheme
• Discounted gym memberships
• Retail discount vouchers
• Rail season ticket loans
• Private virtual GP access
• Pension scheme
• Income protection and more
• Continuous learning & development opportunities
• Seasonal flu jabs on site
• One paid volunteer day per year
• Summer and Winter parties
• Work from home during August
• In-house Excellence Awards and other innovation projects

Privacy:  Metropolis Group respects the privacy of every person for whom we have personal data. We comply with data protection legislation such as the Data Protection Act 1998 and the General Data Protection Regulation which regulates the processing of data and ensures that your data is processed fairly and lawfully, is kept secure and only that data necessary for any processing is kept. You can see our privacy policy at www.metropolis.co.uk/privacy.

Diversity and Inclusion:  We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity and inclusion.  All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, age, religion or belief, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnership, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or disability status.

How to apply: Please send your CV covering letter with notice and salary expectations to bobby.pepelyashka@emap.com Due to the volume of applications, we receive, we are unable to give individual feedback at the application stage, however if you are successfully shortlisted you will be contacted within 10 working days of the closing date.

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