Department overview

Information Systems, Development and Governance (IDG) is an integral part of thetrainline, delivering application and website development projects and operational running of systems that are crucial to the commercial success of our business and our customers.

IDG is a culturally diverse team with a reputation for creative solutions using innovative, collaborative working practices. Within IDG, the Information Systems (IS) team is responsible for the day to day operational delivery of thetrainline systems, ensuring the effective deployment and operation of all systems built by the development teams and our partner suppliers. A major infrastructure refresh is underway implementing the latest virtualisation technology from VMware and Microsoft System Centre Operations manager. In addition to the production environment there are 10+ other environments used in the development and support of our systems.

Purpose of the Role

The Head of IS Operations function reports to the IS Director and is accountable for leading a number of support teams that manage day to day operations of thetrainline systems. Ensuring teams meet the service levels and availability targets of all environments by; co-ordinating planned changes as well as managing the support teams to resolve system issues and outages. This role is also instrumental in the delivery of Infrastructure and Applications into production as part of the overall Trainline.com programme portfolio. In order to be successful in the role, candidates must be able to drive continuous improvements across all IS functional areas.

The teams reporting to the Head of Operations provide Applications, Infrastructure Support and Release Management of thetrainline systems in production and non-production environments. Consisting of permanent and partner teams across the UK and India.

Key Responsibilities

·         Take full ownership of Operations [including infrastructure and applications] to enable the provision of all service offerings 24x7x365

·         Establish a close working relationship with the software development function to ensure that services are launched on-budget, on-time and exceed customer expectations

·         To continually develop the support teams to improve effectiveness, efficiency and productivity.

·         To create and deliver the operational strategy so as to transform the support teams into an efficient proactive organisation

·          Management and ownership of the software release management as well as the management of non-production environments relevant for this this function

·         To create and action a clear communication plan with all team touch points e.g. service review meetings with suppliers, IDG management, as well as line management of permanent staff

·         Operate within defined budgeted financial parameters so as to ensure that the ongoing cost of the provision of infrastructure services is under tight financial control, preventing unexpected costs or liabilities

·         To manage key IS projects/programmes with the Head of IS Projects

Knowledge & Experience

·         A proven track record in leading infrastructure and application teams supporting critical online services – payments/transaction/e-commerce experience would be idea

·          5+ years operations/infrastructure management experience and will have managed an IS function of an online business with responsibility for site/system availability, budgeting, personnel, and headcount

·         Experience in leading application and infrastructure support teams in a distributed environment with both mutualised and direct team members.

·         Familiar with working with outsourcing partners in UK and offshore partners (e.g. in India).

·          Implementation of all elements of change management, release and deployment, capacity management, availability management, configuration management

·         Ability to operate within defined budgeted financial parameters so as to ensure that the on-going cost of the provision of services is under tight financial control, preventing unexpected costs or liabilities

·         Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to build the strong relationships that will be critical to the success of this role

·         Willingness to roll up their sleeves and get stuck into resolving technical issues, technically minded and up to date with current technologies.

·         Identifying inefficiency and implementing Business Process Re-engineering in order to streamline functions and cost.

Skills

·         Support of 24x7 e-commerce systems especially with complex systems integration.

·         Support of high transaction systems.

·         Familiar with the Microsoft technology stack.

·         Familiar with virtual infrastructure including hypervisor technology, blade servers, networking and SAN hardware.

·         Understanding of agile development in particular continuous integration and test automation.

·         High transactional Retail e-commerce systems.

·         Ability to multitask in a fast pace organisation with high rate of context switching

·         Rail industry systems desirable