The Senior Infrastructure Engineer in IMS is responsible for developing standard operating procedures, ensuring infrastructure stability as well as for optimization of technology within the Infrastructure Managed Services architecture. The engineer must be an experienced individual who is proficient in a number of core competencies, such as enabling innovation, optimizing operational performance, and providing exemplary customer service, all in support of Merkle's technology vision. This role will work with EMEA IMS leaders to ensure seamless delivery of infrastructure services and customer support. The engineer will report to the respective EMEA IMS Infrastructure Manager.

Responsibilities:

You will

• Ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of the entire infrastructure stack including compute, storage, and network.
• Conduct capacity planning and resource management for all infrastructure components.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to plan and execute system upgrades and maintenance.
• Support the design and implementation of disaster recovery plans and business continuity strategies.
• Manage monitoring, logging, and alerting across the infrastructure.
• Develop and maintain automation tools for managing infrastructure resources.
• Analyse and solve complex infrastructure problems, if needed engage and collaborate with vendor support.
• Collaborate with wider teams to design and enhance the architecture of infrastructure systems, ensuring alignment with business needs and technology standards.

Incident Management:

You will

• Support incident response efforts across the infrastructure stack, collaborating with stakeholders.
• Perform root cause analysis for infrastructure-related incidents and implement corrective actions.
• Participate in engineer on-call rotations to provide 24x7 support for all critical infrastructure issues.

Team and Culture: 

You will

• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence.
• Actively enforce knowledge-sharing in the team, to eliminate and avoid single points of failure.

Essential Skills:

Technical Expertise:

• Expert skills in hardware configuration, troubleshooting and management of Cisco UCS and Nexus products
• Proven experience managing and optimizing a diverse infrastructure stack.
• Strong command shell / CLI skills, and Linux / PS shells are your preferred way of working.
• Understanding of storage solutions (SAN, NAS, cloud storage) and backup systems, preferably HPE Nimble and StoreOnce.
• Strong understanding of network protocols, routing, switching, and firewalls.
• Solid understanding of virtualization (VMware, Hyper-V) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and orchestration.
• Experience in DNS management and troubleshooting.
• Experience in network security best practices.
• Experience in performance tuning and capacity planning.
• Good understanding of disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Soft Skills:

• Strong organizational, interpersonal, business, and analytical skills.
• Good knowledge of and use of the principles of ITIL methodology.
• Highly motivated, collaborative, with the ability to inspire others.
• Keep up-to-date with relevant industry trends and security findings.
• Are open to change and adapt ways of working to changing business needs.

Desirable Skills:

• Extensive knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Experience in the principles of cloud governance.
• Good project management and communication skills.
• Experience with load balancers (F5, HAProxy, Nginx) and network monitoring tools.
• Familiarity with database technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL
• Previous experience in mentoring the team so that they grow into their roles and develop their career.
• Experience in budget planning and management.

Qualification

5+ years of information technology experience, at least 2 years of experience with the relevant Cisco stack. The applicant should have a broad technical understanding, preferably including Windows and Linux-based servers, networking and storage technologies, backup and recovery technologies, virtualization, and cloud technologies