Data Centre Operator
Start date: 01/07/2025
End date: 30/06/2026
Location: Cardiff - onsite
Contract: Inside ir35
Responsibilities
The candidate will be responsible for:
- Systems monitoring and management
- Observing monitoring consoles and event driven alerts
- Coordinating with vendors when support calls are raised for assistance (e.g. BT)
- Calling the company on on-call expert staff to respond to an out of hours incident (e.g. DBA team, Network team)
- Taking first line corrective action for agreed and documented administrative systems (for example re-sending faxes which have failed delivery)
- Running & monitoring (not building, but see Additional Responsibilities below) traditional batch schedules, including using automated tools such as Control/M, Visualcron etc.
- Running (not building, but see Additional Responsibilities below) weekend release jobs/scripts to release development changes into production
- Physical management of Xerox bulk printing
Other physical duties
- Daily removal of tapes and boxing up for off-siting
- Activities in the datacentre on power down weekends in support of engineers
- Test access to systems to prove availability (e.g. logon to an application)
- Conduct physical patrols to ensure datacentre temperature etc. (in addition to watching automatic building management alert systems)
- All other ad hoc activities reasonably required or expected to ensure smooth operation of the batch processing and datacentre operations as requested by the company under the supervision of an of a company Operations Coordinator
- Ensure security and access procedures are followed, this includes maintenance of related logs and records.
Additional Responsibilities
Preference will be given to flexible candidates who can provide support for the BMC Control-M scheduling environment, the job execution environment and the production output environments:
- Regularly review the OPS procedures and instructions to ensure they are relevant, up to date and followed.
- Ensure accurate Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Adhoc reports are produced as required.
- Apply required schedule changes
- Analyse and resolve limited production problems and incidents.
Key Skills
The candidate must possess:
- A proven background in operations
- Ability to work in small groups and on own initiative
- A self-motivated attitude demonstrated by providing solutions and ideas to the company
- Management in line with their strategy to improve the efficiency of the operations environment
Additionally the applicant must:
- Demonstrate a philosophy which seeks to ensure a high quality of service for the Production systems
- Be able to work under pressure and remain focussed on providing a 24/7 service
- Work confidently and efficiently with other technicians and teams
- Be experienced in root-cause analysis and provide solutions to problems
- Be prepared to continuously develop own skills and competencies and understand changes in market trends where these are relevant to the role.
In addition the applicant would ideally possess:
- A proven background in batch processing and job scheduling. Experience of a job scheduling tool, particularly Control-M, would be an advantage as would experience of a Microfocus environment.
- Good understanding of JCL
- Good understanding of Korn shell scripting
- Knowledge of Linux and UNIX commands
- Basic knowledge of Oracle database structures
- Understand the fundamentals of ITIL
The job is based on a 12 hour shift pattern of days and nights, covering 364 days per year
- Christmas day off. Weekly shifts to be agreed between client and contract personnel Data Centre Operator