Network Support Team Lead

Vodacom Business, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Vodacom Group, is a leading pan-African corporate connectivity and telecommunications provider that has brought affordable and reliable connectivity to Africa since 1992. In that time, we have built strong relationships in the sectors that are driving the continent’s economic growth; helping them stay connected across Africa, and to the rest of the world.

We are recruiting to fill the position below:

Job Position: Network Support Team Lead
Job Location: Lagos
Department: Operations
Reporting to: Senior Manager, Network Operations
Job type: (Full-time)
Employment Type: Permanent

Key Roles

• The Job holder will be responsible for managing and coordinating the Network Support team and ensuring that all incident and network problems are properly escalated and resolved in line with SLA and MTTR expectations.

Key Responsibilities

• Coordinate activities of the Network Support team.
• Responsible for informing Management, 3rd partner vendors and peers about network performance and service availability, primarily interacting with both internal and external customers, engineers and the whole technical team
• Coordinates the duty shift for the team and carefully allocates staff members (Network support engineers) on different shift duties, ensuring the whole shift works in an efficient and effective manner and translates into a pivotal part of service delivery and support; inculcating speed, simplicity and trust.
• Focus on identifying opportunities to benefit customers and offer advice and guidance in responding to customer enquiries
• Develop a sustainable work process, entrenching best practices and work standards that will help to reduce the amount of repeated faults and reduce MTTR; proactively identifying network related issues prior to occurrence and thus reducing escalations within the business
• Inspire the team to get the job done with focus on achieving MTTR & SLA
• Perform 2nd/3rd -Level, professional troubleshooting support
• Ensure optimum service availability and performance
• Underlying awareness of the bigger picture
• Use negotiation skills, tact and diplomacy to resolve conflicts.
• Willingness and ability to learn new products and network technologies quickly, often without the focus on formalized training.
• Ability to think quickly, take the initiative and willingness to make judgment calls and
• to work both independently and as part of a team
• Be able to communicate about networking issues effectively and in a comprehensible manner
• both to internal and external customer
• Ensure customer satisfaction through effective analysis and helping customers to resolve issues with respect to their services irrespective of the demarcations between Vodacom and its customers in a bid to exceed customer’s expectation.
• Engage with others teams to proffer solutions and improve the network performance.
• Monitoring and Reporting that informs Management to make decisions on Service Improvement Plans
• Take initiative to recognize and resolve issues as they arise, which will improve performance for the team and the company as a whole and Keep the team tasked with making steady progress; meeting deadlines and budgetary allocations and highlighting any significant issues to senior management.
• Integration, decommissioning and configuration VSAT remote on iDirect platform (ibuilder and imonitor)
• Support of VSAT Hub and troubleshooting of all VSAT related calls logged from Hub to Remotes
• Troubleshooting / managing of all Backhaul and Vodacom managed CE devices
• Support of all 3rd party vendors for both core and access links.
• Support of Field engineers in fault rectification so as to meet MTTR and SLA
• Configuration and troubleshooting of all Core and Access P2P radios on the network.
• Troubleshooting and configuration of OEM vendor devices on the network.
• Troubleshooting of core and access transmission devices on the network.
• Application of high level IP routing and configuration on core and access devices.
• Resolve Level 2 and Level 3 IP network related issues, such as switching, Routing and QOS.
• Troubleshooting of IP/ MPLS connectivity issues on the core and Access network.
• Configuration of IP Network devices ( Routers and Switches )
• Benchmark outbound/inbound carrier with Satellite provider to ensure optimum performance of the HUB

Qualifications

• The ideal candidate must be a have a University degree/HND in Electrical/Electronic Engineering or related fields.
• He must be able to use a number of monitoring/Ticketing/Reporting platforms e.g. Sage Pastel Evolution,Cacti, Azotel, Nagios, Entuity, Cambridge VNMS, SAF, Idirect NMS-Ibuilder and Imonitor ,NEC & Ceragon NMSs.
• The preferred candidate must have 5+ years of experience working in network operations -ISP with an emphasis on Network and transmission devices and 5+ years of experience interfacing with the customers as well Technical certifications such as ITIL, Network Design of Idirect Hub and CCNP preferred.

Competency/Skills
Job Related Skills:

• Strong communication skills across all levels within and outside the organizations.
• Good troubleshooting skills.
• Well-developed Oral and written skills.
• Be well organized, structured and be able to drive and oversee multi-discipline projects within the organization.
• Knowledge of Sage Pastel Evolution,Cacti, Azotel, Nagios, Entuity, Cambridge VNMS, SAF, Idirect NMS-Ibuilder and Imonitor ,NEC & Ceragon NMSs.
• Knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite
• Excellent communication skills and ability to translate customer requirement into technical installation documents.