Data Storage Specialist

Position SummaryThe Data Storage Specialist is responsible for managing the delivery of complex data storage and backup services, which integrate public clouds storage services with a variety of on-premise data storage solutions, and realization of advanced data management and data sharing solutions.His responsibilities include exploring the business needs, understanding the emerging technologies and industry trends to define the optimal direction for complex data storage and backup services. He provides technical leadership for designing, implementing, and evolving the solutions, which enable those services. He is responsible for secure and efficient service operations and acts as a supervisor and mentor for more junior staff while overseeing their daily activities. He is an excellent communicator and subject matter expert, capable of providing technical training and workshops to KAUST users and speaking to the crowd at the events such as seminars and conferences.Major AccountabilitiesFacilitates the interactions with the KAUST community on different levels, including faculty and managers, to understand the business requirements for implementing the complex data storage and backup services and advanced data management and sharing solutions.Manages the delivery of complex data storage and backup services and advanced data management and data sharing solutions, which store the University’s critical business and research data and enable effective research collaboration, by translating the business requirements into architectural designs and implementable solutions and providing expert leadership and facilitation for implementing and evolving those solutions. Works as a subject matter expert who offers expert-level advice on complex scenarios involving advanced data storage and backup services, data management and data collaboration solutions and provides expert-level advice to IT technology decision-makers affecting the whole organization.Participates in efforts to develop long-term strategies and roadmaps to optimize storage services and address the growing needs of KAUST users.Leads the organization level projects that impact the KAUST community or acts as a top-level technology expert on the project teams, responsible for making the technical decision in the project.Continuously identifies and drives ways to improve services and user satisfaction. Ensures that compute services meet and continue to meet all of their agreed performance targets and SLAs by supervising the operations and acting as a mentor and technical lead for more junior staff. Consistently drives operational excellence, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency.Promotes the DevOps and SRE practices and ensures that the team leverages automation to increase operations efficiency. Participates in developing, implementing, and maintaining policies, procedures, and standards pertaining to data storage and backup services, archiving services, data management and data collaboration solutions and data privacy and security. Constantly demonstrates a high level of IT security awareness and acts as a role model in this area.Tracks the industry trends, monitors current and emerging technologies, and maintains his knowledge on the high level of currency.Explores the innovations, drives the evaluation of new technologies, and presents recommendations to the management.Interfaces and communicates with other IT departments, business and research users, including senior faculty and leadership.Manages vendors and supports negotiations in contracts.Provides technical workshops and training to KAUST users.Presents technical solutions and stories at seminars and conferences. Person Requirements Competencies Essential:Strong technical skills.Strong ability to translate the business needs into the technical requirements and solution architectures.Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.Attention to details.Ability to understand the relationship between own specialism and wider customer/organizational requirements.Excellent communications and facilitations skills.Teamworking skills.Creativity, innovation and ethical thinking in applying solutions.Ability to multitask and work under the pressure.Good time management and organizational skills. Preferred:· Leadership skills.Qualifications · Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, MIS, Electrical Engineering, or related disciplines, or equivalent experience.· Master’s degree is a plus.· Advanced level of SAN, NAS, HCI, Backup, SDS, public cloud (Azure, AWS) certifications.· Expert-level certification is a plus.Experience10+ years of IT experience with at least 8 years in storage management in a multi-platform environment including data backup, archival, and parallel file systems.Experience in managing complex systems environments.In-depth knowledge in the following areasStorage solutions and technologies from vendors such as EMC, NetApp, Dell, IBMStorage hardware including SAN, NAS, storage controllers, fiber channel, SAS, SATA, SCSI, iSCSI, IB-based networks and RAID disk configurations.Object storage, GPFS file systemNFS, CIFS, CephCloud based storage solutions (Azure, AWS, GCP, and IBM clouds)Operating systems such as Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu, CentOS)TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager)DevOps