Service Manager for IT Infrastructure and Support

Aurora is an established supplier of skilled manpower to ESA. Aurora has the opportunity to expand our support to ESA in the domain of Science Operations.
Happiness of our employees has proven key to obtaining excellent results and a client who also regards us highly for excellent service.

Overview

Aurora with its Consortium is the largest Service provider of engineering and scientific support at ESA/ESAC.

Employees are our key resource! We know that progress is only achieved by a happy motivated team, that’s why Aurora employs top quality staff by offering challenging work, responsibility, a pleasant environment and excellent remuneration.

The client is now changing to a real Service and therefore we are looking for an experienced Service Manager for the Infrastructure and Operations team of circa 20 staff mostly in Spain and 4 in the Netherlands. The post holder will report directly to the Managing Director. The post holder will lead IT assigned activities, ensure program deliverables are met and the program is operationally sound while achieving KPI performance. Utilise industry project management methodologies and tools throughout program lifecycle. This position works directly on-site at the customer autonomously with managemnent support. Incumbents of this position will regularly exercise discretion and substantial decision-making authority while leading team members and driving overall team performance.

Brief overview of the Infrastructure and Operations Team

As part of the ESA’s Data Science and Archives division, the Science and Operations IT Unit (SITU) is responsible for the planning, design, implementation, management, Operations, maintenance and evolution of all scientific and operations IT Infrastructure, IT projects and IT applications within the Science & Operations Department, which is part of the Directorate of Science SITU is also responsible for proposing commonality and cost efficiency of scientific and operations IT solutions, IT architectures and IT services and applications across the department and to provide it while ensuring the needed level of protection to all those IT components
After the merger of the former ESTEC SSO IT team and its activities with SITU, SITU is now geographically distributed across European Space Research and Technical Centre (ESTEC) and European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC), having presence in both sites. The IT infrastructure managed by SITU is also present in both sites.SITU is organized into two main sub-units:

• Infrastructure and Operations (I&O)
• Projects and Applications (P&A)

Specifically office laptops, and general user IT such as 365 and email are provided by ESA Corporate IT and outside of the scope.
For the sake of simplicity, only the key areas are shown in the following paragraphs. A detailed document is available upon application.
The I&O sub-unit provides IT services, solutions and consultancy in scientific and operations IT infrastructure and cybersecurity across the department. I&O also designs, operates, maintains and evolves this scientific and operations IT infrastructure. Infrastructure main areas (see RD11-03 for a more detailed description) are:

• Science data storage, preservation and distribution
• Science data processing
• Datacentre & common Science and Operations Department (SCI-S) IT infrastructure
• Science research environments
• Cosmos portal and services IT infrastructure
• IT Security

I&O involves the current systems:

• IT Storage systems (NetApp, others) and protocols (NFS, iSCSI, distributed, others)
• IT backup systems and software (Veritas, NetApp snapshots, tape libraries, others)
• IT virtualization systems (VMware, RedHat, KVM, Oracle, others)
• IT Hyperconvergence Infrastructure
• IT monitoring systems (Zabbix, others)
• IT machine data and logging systems (Splunk, others)
• IT private and public cloud Infrastructure as a Service providers and systems (RedHat CloudForms, OpenStack, VMware, AWS, others)
• IT servers deployment and automation (RedHat Satellite, Ansible, Terraform, others)
• Databases (Oracle, Postgresql, Greenplum, Intersystems Cache, others)
• Big Data (Cloudera, Hadoop, Spark, others)
• atacentre operations (openDCIM, rack monitoring)
• VLANs systems and infrastructures (10G/40G/100G technologies)
• Load balancers and web proxies (F5, Fortigate, others)
• HPC, HTC, parallel computing (Grid, MPI, others)
• Containers: Kubernetes, Docker
• CI/CD: Jenkins, Drone, Gitlab, BitBucket, Artifactory, Docker registry, Nexus registry
• Atlassian Products (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket) usage
• Operating systems: Linux/UNIX, Windows, MacOS

Service Manager Duties

1. Ensures that programs meet quality, schedule, milestone, and budget commitments and leadership for staff.
2. Coordinate and lead customer facing meetings related to the program. Collaborates within the Program, Engineering, Quality and IT teams to develop and implement program management and ITIL methodologies, processes, tools and mentoring.
3. Ensures that the goals and objectives of the program are understood and agreed with the ESA Technical Responsible and drive overall performance of IT team.
4. Manages program expectations, scope, risk and changes.
5. Provides leadership surrounding issue identification and resolution. Acts as point of contact for escalation of program issues and resolves program conflict.
6. Works directly with System Engineers, IT Security expert/QA team to manage the technical aspects of a development project
7. Continually assesses program resource requirements and reassigns based on revised project schedules.
8. With assistance ensures monthly reporting, tracking team and program metrics.
9. Resource management of team including prioritizing tasks and deadlines appropriately.
10. Builds a positive, collaborative working environment that instills respect, trust, quality and success as its core goals.
11. Comply with ESA’s values, code of conduct, quality, security and occupational health, safety and environmental policies and procedures.
12. Verification of new engineers and technicians recommended by the recruitment team (several new positions)

Specific qualification requirements

• Experience managing IT programs and leading teams of IT staff without direct authority.
• Reasonable technical understanding of IT infrastructure, hardware, networks, application and security. We have technical experts in the team which can be relied upon.
• Proven effectiveness managing project resources and prioritizing task conflicts.
• Team building skills.
• Meeting facilitation skills and leadership experience.
• Proficient in the English Language (Spoken and Written).

Legal and Security Requirements

• All applicants must be legally allowed to work in Spain without the need to obtain a work visa. Only European Union (EU), European Economic Area (EEA) and SWISS citizens can be employed by Aurora in Spain.
• Applicants are required to provide a copy of their passport and degree certificate. Aurora will validate the Degree with the issuing University and provide evidence to ESA.
• In line with ESA’s security requirements, prior to issuing a letter of employment the applicant shall provide to Aurora a recent official document declaring that they are of good conduct from the country where currently resident, and Aurora will validate your employment history.

Location

It is expected that the work will be performed at the ESAC, the European Space Astronomy Centre at Villafranca del Castillo, near Madrid (Spain). Currently the team is successfully teleworking from home due to covid-19 with occasional visits.

Contract

• The selected candidate will receive good remuneration in line with management responsibility.
• You will be registered for both social security and tax in Spain.
• The standard working hours are 40 per week. There are 12 public holidays and an additional 30 annual days holiday.
• In addition to public health services Aurora provides private medical insurance in Spain.
• Training to improve efficiency and provide strength for future career are of course included.
• Aurora can assist financially and provide recent experience information for relocation.

To be considered for this Position

Prior to  26 February 2021, if you think you are an excellent engineer or scientist  and you have the right profile to cover one or more of the above activities, you can directly get in contact with Alex Jeanes at email alexjeanes@aurora.nl or you can formally apply via our Job Application form quoting IT Manager(AO/2-100045/20/ES/JD) as reference.

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