Job Description

MISSION / JOB PURPOSE

You will lead, manage and build a state of the art deployment management team located in the AXA Shared Services Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

You will be responsible to implement processes, ITIL best practices, deployment plans & schedules, standards and guidelines, required technologies and automation to efficient deploy application releases into the various environments within AXA Asia.

You work closely with the Environment Management, Change & Release Management and Solution Delivery teams to define and agree on release and deployment plans.

You will deliver effective deployment management services by delivering change well planned, faster (DevOps/Agile), at optimum cost and minimized risk by assuring traceable and consistent release implementations.

The main purpose of your role is to deploy releases into production and establish effective use of the service in order to deliver value to the customer and be able to handover to service operations.

The role will involve the creation of common standards for deployment of applications across a number of platforms and technologies. Engagement of tools for automation during deployment activities and promotion of agile development and deployment across a DevOps framework where applicable.

The role is expected to perform the tactical and operational management for deployment services with related vendors and is held responsible for the KPIs & quality of service delivered.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

Role & Responsibilities

• Manage a team of deployment specialists and apply AXA\xe2\x80\x99s Values.
• Build a high-performance team by managing your team actively on their business and behavioral objectives
• Implement personal development plans for all individual team members, review regularly
• Coach the individual employee where necessary and provide open and honest feedback
• Define and verify entry/exit criteria for release packages, ensure mandatory documents are signed off
• Manage stakeholder and change communications in line with deployment plans
• Create and maintain stakeholder agreed deployment plans and ensure appropriate resource planning well in advance according to the schedule
• Own, define and improve the release package deployment process following industry best practices
• Effectively collaborate with the various Service Transition teams, such as: Change Release Management, Environment Management, Solution Delivery and Service Operations teams
• Accountable to define and implement Deployment Management strategy
• Define SDP (Service Design Package) standards and guidelines
• Verify that a release complies with the SDP (Service Design Package), architecture and related standards
• Ensure the integrity of hardware and software is protected during installation, handling, packaging and delivery
• Define, implement, maintain, use and own standard release and deployment procedures and tools
• Manage and deploy/re-deploy/remove/retire software licences
• Package and build the release package so that it can be backed out or remediated if required
• Use Configuration Management procedures, the CMS and DML to manage and control components during the build and deployment activities, e.g. to verify the prerequisites, co-requisites and post-installation requests
• Ensure that the architecture and infrastructure on which the application will be deployed are robust and stable
• Analysis deployments and conduct lessons learned to continuous improve the service
• Define and implement required SLAs and KPIs to measure success of the provided service
• Responsible to manage vendor engagements end to end related to Deployment capabilities, review vendor\xe2\x80\x99s performance according to agreed measurements, discuss improvements and define improvement plans as necessary, review contract and identify cost savings were possible
• Develop deployment playbooks for critical applications
• Evaluate production risks associated with production deployment activities
• Support staging and QA environment deployments through automation
• Identify opportunities for the automation of existing deployment processes
• Communicate with DBAs and other roles dedicate to support of store, networking, and database systems.
• Accompany all new application architectures and deployments with contingency plans and deployment playbooks to execute in case of failure
• Prepare specialized deployment processes to support disaster recovery and business continuity scenarios.
• Conduct quarterly reviews of deployment activities and deployment operations
• Identify root cause for deployment-related downtime and participate in after-action reviews for production deployment activities.
• Create an on-call schedule for deployment and release engineering resources to support production.

Qualifications

Job Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science or related fields
• ITIL Foundations Certification is preferred
• Strong system integration experience across a variety of platform from front-end to back end covering new and legacy technologies
• Solid experience in conducting planning and delivery of complex project as per ITIL framework and excellent understanding of release methodologies (preferably DEVOPS)
• People management, resources management and vendor management skills
• Good understanding of application architecture and infrastructure components
• Knowledge and experience in application platforms and technologies including, but not limited to: Java, .NET, Pega, Guidewire, Web Methods, Informatica, Oracle and back-office AS400 systems using traditional languages such as COBOL and RPG, Microsoft SQL, Chef and Puppet, OpenStack, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services
• Experience in programming languages such as PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, .NET, Node.js, Rails, Java and other computer languages
• Performance monitoring experience with tool such as Nagios, Zabbix, Sensu, Amazon CloudWatch, Splunk, New Relic and/or other products

Ideal Candidate:

As the ideal candidate for this role you pay attention to details, are committed to precision, able to assess deployment risks immediately, have a technical aptitude and you are able to motivate teams in challenging situations and you have several years of experience in release engineering with prior responsibility for revenue-generating systems in production. You should also have an understanding of release engineering that spans both software development and system administration as you will be interacting with both developers and operations professionals in addition to project managers focused on release management. Provide a proven track record of managing teams and creating on-call schedules for release support activities

AXA