Head of Platforms, DA EMEA

Who are we?

Experian gathers, analyses and processes data in ways others can't. We help individuals take financial control and access financial services, businesses make smarter decisions, lenders lend more responsibly, and organizations prevent identity fraud and crime. Our 17,800 people in 45 countries believe the possibilities for you, and our world, are growing. We're investing in new technologies, talented people and innovation so we can help create a better tomorrow.

What do we have to offer?

Not only do we offer our employees a competitive benefits package and flexibility to have a good work life balance. We offer you an exciting, challenging environment where you get the opportunity to work in an international team and continuously learn and develop your technical and soft skills.

Position Summary

Overall responsibility for the health and availability of EMEA DA’s production systems and services. Accountable for building and leading the appropriate teams and practices needed to achieve EMA DA’s services availability objectives.

Broad authority in designing, approving and implementing the EMEA DA platforms systems architecture, instrumentation, security, and runtime technology stack.

Leads the implementation and execution of modern DevOps/SRE practices.

Responsible for defining and leading the preparation of appropriate reporting production service level & incident response metrics, and to ensure efficient response to incidents and problems.

Responsible for making sure all necessary IT security controls are implemented for EMEA DA, per GSO’s requirements and standards.

Responsibilities

• Production uptime: Overall accountability for EMEA’s DA’s production systems & services availability and performance.
• Systems design and operational readiness: Collaborate with product development and EITS executive management to lead the review of systems design and operation readiness, to ensure platforms meet uptime and performance requirements. Participate in the selection of technology stacks and systems architecture design, with ultimate approval authority.
• Change management: Serve as the gate keeper for all changes to production, including infrastructure, patches, configuration, software upgrades, etc. Ensure that appropriate steps have been taken and plans are in place to safely deploy changes without affecting services to customers negatively.
• In incident management: Accountable for the coordination of Level 3 response to production issues and executive escalation when needed. Assure L3 engagement is timely and effective. Leadership role in the establishment of P1 and crisis response processes, and evaluating these processes as part of incident post mortems.
• In Problem management: Make sure the root cause analysis is properly conducted, including deeper analysis techniques such as “5 why’s”, and ensure that appropriate steps are taken to mitigate the risk of future occurrences. Prepare regular reports and update to executive team.
• Monitoring / alerting: Determine strategy and lead implementation of industry best practices in monitoring / alerting systems, instrumentation, logging, etc.
• Performance engineering: Lead the performance engineering and testing of new or modified solutions.
• Capacity planning: in collaboration with EITS, take the appropriate steps to ensure all systems are properly sized to meet upcoming load and demand.
• Preventive maintenance: Coordinates the implementation of preventive maintenance processes, including database administration, patch deployments, etc.
• Security: In collaboration with GSO, ensures that all security policies are strictly followed and enforced, and generally safeguards the security of our platforms.
• Service Level Metrics: Manages the definition, creation, establishment and executive reporting of uptime/service level metrics on all hosted systems.
• DevSecOps/SRE: Drives the adoption of modern DevSecOps/SRE practices and automation.

Experience and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related technical discipline.
• 10+ years of relevant experience in complex commercial platform operation and SaaS, including design/engineering, administration and maintenance.
• People management experience, with demonstrated ability to create, structure and lead high performance organizations.
• Deep technical expertise, and the ability to assess a broad set of relevant technologies, processes and practices in commercial platforms operation.
• Strong Information Security background.
• Strong understanding of ITIL and other IT management frameworks.
• Demonstrated exceptional judgement when making decisions with systems architecture, technology stacks and anything affecting critical production systems.
• Proven technical and thought leadership, and demonstrated ability to implement changes for continuous improvement.
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, and ability to communicate effectively at all corporate levels and with customers.
• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities and workstreams in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience working in a matrix environment and leveraging resources across the enterprise to achieve goals.
• Strong experience collaborating with product/software development teams, and deep understanding of the product development lifecycle.
• Experience and proven success driving DevSecOps/SRE transformation.