Network Engineer

Introduction

A career in IBM Consulting is rooted by long-term relationships and close collaboration with clients across the globe.

You'll work with visionaries across multiple industries to improve the hybrid cloud and AI journey for the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Your ability to accelerate impact and make meaningful change for your clients is enabled by our strategic partner ecosystem and our robust technology platforms across the IBM portfolio; including Software and Red Hat.

Curiosity and a constant quest for knowledge serve as the foundation to success in IBM Consulting. In your role, you'll be encouraged to challenge the norm, investigate ideas outside of your role, and come up with creative solutions resulting in ground breaking impact for a wide network of clients. Our culture of evolution and empathy centers on long-term career growth and development opportunities in an environment that embraces your unique skills and experience.

Job Description

Your role and responsibilities

The Lead Infrastructure Manager, under the vendor's F5 Managed Services team, is responsible for leading a dedicated team tasked with managing, maintaining, optimizing, and providing Level 2 support for the client's F5 infrastructure. This role is critical to ensuring the stability, reliability, and security of the F5 product set deployed at the client site. This role demands a blend of deep technical knowledge, leadership capabilities, and customer service orientation to deliver exceptional F5 load balancer managed services. The Lead Infrastructure Manager must be well-versed in F5 technologies, adept at leading teams, and committed to maintaining the highest standards of service quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Project Work Oversight:
• Oversee the creation of new Virtual IPs (VIPs) and manage access to member pools.
• Ensure proper Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate configurations are maintained.
• Lead the development of custom iRules for network traffic management.
• Provide support for the F5 Software as a Service (SaaS) Web Application Firewall (WAF).
• Operational Work:
• Coordinate and manage F5 operating system maintenance, upgrades, and patches.
• Coordinate maintenance windows with the client's internal teams, third-party vendors, and other support personnel.
• Troubleshoot services, processes, and applications on the F5 system.
• Maintain current backups, confirm successful logging, and support disaster recovery (DR) testing, including F5 failover, restore from backup, and maintenance of runbooks.
• Provide project-based activities including moves, adds, and changes for F5-related work through the agreed-upon service request process.
• F5 SaaS creation and maintenance of load balancer configurations.
• Incident Response:
• Serve as the primary point of contact for F5-related managed services requests.
• Evaluate and classify alerts and other inbound requests.
• Lead knowledge documentation and updates, troubleshooting, diagnostics, solution validation before implementation, and operational work.
• Hybrid Cloud Operation Support:
• Monitor the client's F5 infrastructure environment during service hours.
• Manage incident, event, and service requests collaboratively with the client's engineers and technical contacts.
• Ingest runbooks and collaborate on documentation between the vendor and client.
• Team Leadership:
• Act as an extension of the client's IT organization, providing support based on their operational requirements.
• Provide leadership, mentoring, and guidance to the team.
• Represent the vendor in interactions with the client, ensuring alignment with service level agreements (SLAs) and satisfaction of client needs.
• Tool and Process Management:
• Leverage the client's provided ServiceNow system as the system of record.
• Utilize client-owned F5 devices, productivity, and email systems for service delivery.
• Performance Tuning and Security Management:
• Analyze server environments for bottlenecks, recurring behaviors, instability, and wait-based event correlations for performance tuning.
• Manage and apply best practices around security auditing, policy application, and centralized authentication administration.
• Documentation and Communication:
• Document, publish, and maintain documentation and procedures for key service components.
• Review and update documentation quarterly or as necessary, including all client-created documentation relevant to the service.
• Vendor Management:
• Manage relationships with external vendor support services as necessary.
• Escalate tickets to external vendors per documented SOPs when required.
• Reporting and Analytics:
• Gather metrics on service and system performance, capacity, and availability.
• Analyze capacity, availability, utilization, and behavior patterns, presenting findings with recommendations for changes.
  
  

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field - or years of experience in the field. An advanced degree would be advantageous.
• Proven experience in managing and maintaining F5 BIG-IP platforms, including extensive knowledge of F5 iControl, iCall, and TMSH command-line interfaces.
• Demonstrated expertise in SSL/TLS, IPv4/IPv6, and TCP/IP networking protocols.
• Strong understanding of web application firewalls (WAF) and web application security.
• Experience with scripting languages like Python, Bash, or PowerShell to automate routine tasks and processes.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (preferably AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Proficiency in ITIL frameworks for incident, problem, and change management.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to effectively liaise with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong leadership abilities, with a proven track record of motivating and developing teams.
• Ability to work independently and make decisions under pressure while ensuring adherence to SLAs and compliance standards.
• Certifications such as F5 Certified BIG-IP Administrator or similar would be highly beneficial.