Application and Middleware Manager

Job Description

The Company:

Our client is one of Ireland's leading retail and SME banks. Their focus is centred on ensuring we deliver what our customers, colleagues and communities need to be successful.

Your Role:

The nature of Banking is changing. Delivery of services to our customers via digital channels and enabling our own colleagues with effective technology solutions is a core focus of the Bank. Our client has embarked on a significant digital transformation program. This will lead to an enhanced customer experience, through re-development of the delivery channels and the ongoing evolution of the bank's infrastructure and operations in order to provide cost-effective, secure and resilient services to our customers.

To support and enable this transformation a significant and exciting opportunity has been created for an Applications and Middleware manager in our Enterprise IT Services department. This role will lead and develop the capability for the support, management and development of a number of applications and services that underpins many of the critical services that support the day to day running of a digital bank.

This is an influential appointment with growing responsibility, in recognising the importance of this role to the organisation we are seeking candidates who have a track record in technical oversight at a software/application and infrastructure levels with a keen eye for continuous improvement through automation. This role is integral to development of the Digital Bank and requires an innovative team player who will strive to deliver and understand the 'big picture' while working seamlessly and collaboratively across Group Technology and the business to achieve the required outcomes.

Your Team:

The Applications and Middleware manager will work within the Group Technology EITS department and partner with teams across the business to influence and improve our overall capability and service offering. You will lead a number of empowered teams who execute their work to a high standard while continuously looking for ways to improve on the service they deliver through process improvement and automation.

Your Responsibilities:

Functional Strategy & Delivery

• Develop a high performing support organisation with responsibility for a variety of applications and services that underpin the bank's digital capability.
• Foster strong relationships with business owners and all necessary stakeholders.
• Develop working relationships with all upstream partners both internally from an infrastructure and networking perspective and externally with application vendors.
• Develop relationships with the Architecture team to maintain awareness and influence direction of applications and services under your remit.
• Maintain the integrity of the in-scope technologies including patch management, upgrades and certificate management.
• Ensure that a proactive monitoring capability is implemented in a consistent manner for applications and services under your remit.
• In support of your team's success, implement a suite of standard processes and best practices including ticket management, quality metrics and KPIs.
• Where applicable, implement and prove Disaster Recovery policies as per defined schedules.
• Ensure the delivery of the enterprise change programs to committed dates and budgets.
• Maintain appropriate controls and documentation to ensure compliance with all relevant policies and standards.
• Provide coaching, mentoring, and training to all team members.

Risk Management & Control

• Ensure a good understanding of the risk landscape across the in scope processes.
• Maintain the in scope control environment ensuring the controls are fit for purpose, operated effectively, aligned to internal standards and regulatory requirements and seek to enhance and automate where possible.
• Proactively seek to minimise audit findings by implementing effective and permanent solutions while considering the wider implications of any findings.
• Support the successful remediation of the findings from the current or any future audits.

Lead an inspiring Culture

• Support the implementation of initiatives that emerge from the Staff Surveys to enhance the working environment for the team.
• Lead the values of the organisation acting as a role model within the team.
• Support a culture of open discussion within the team.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Support the senior manager ensuring the joint development of the capabilities that will further enable optimization of service delivery.
• Ensure that monthly reports and metrics are optimised, delivered on time with relevant updates and high accuracy.
• Maintain productive and collaborative relationships across Group Technology's other teams.

Requirements:

Essential

• Proven experience managing and maintaining the currency of environments at all levels including software/application, O/S and hardware.
• The desire to make a difference in a highly-collaborative cross functional environment.
• Tenacious problem-solving and effective communication skills with the ability to develop strong cross functional relationships.
• Experience of working with teams across the delivery lifecycle from Business, Development & Operations.
• The ability to influence other teams to support a common direction and roadmap.
• Solid understanding and experience of modern software development practices.
• Solid understanding and experience of Infrastructure technologies (e.g. VMware, Kubernetes, Containers, PaaS).
• Solid understanding of IT security best practices.
• Experience with API Integration patterns.
• The ability to enable and drive large scale transformations initiatives.

Desired

• Previous experience of working with the SWIFT payments platform.
• Previous experience of managing/administering the Atlassian product suite.
• Exposure to some of the following: K8s/OCP, Jboss, VMware, OPICs, SMAX.
• Industry certifications in relevant technologies.

Morgan McKinley is acting as an Employment Agency and references to pay rates are indicative.

BY APPLYING FOR THIS ROLE YOU ARE AGREEING TO OUR TERMS OF SERVICE WHICH TOGETHER WITH OUR PRIVACY STATEMENT GOVERN YOUR USE OF MORGAN MCKINLEY SERVICES.