Head of Department: OTT Managed Services

Who we are:

Irdeto is the world leader in digital platform cybersecurity, empowering businesses to innovate for a secure, connected future. Building on over 50 years of expertise in security, Irdeto’s services and solutions protect revenue, enable growth and fight cybercrime in video entertainment, video games, and connected industries including transport, health and infrastructure. Irdeto is the security partner dedicated to empowering a secure world where people can connect with confidence. 
 
With teams and offices around the world, Irdeto’s greatest asset is its people - our diversity is celebrated through an inclusive workplace, where everyone has an equal opportunity to drive innovation and contribute to Irdeto's success. 

Managed Services 

The Managed Services team in Randburg is responsible for development, system integration and system testing of the various software components that allow MultiChoice to offer its services to consumers. To that end we're looking to hire for the role of Head of Department: OTT Managed Services.

The Role: 

Head of Department: OTT Managed Services

Within the Managed Services team, the role of Head of Department serves a dual purpose: they will manage the development and delivery of various software components, as well as providing customer support, operational support, and software maintenance for software components in production. The primary function of the Head of Department is therefore to manage a team of developers, testers, integration engineers and solution architects to design, develop, deploy, and maintain software systems that automate the processing, compression, encryption and delivery of media to a variety of endpoints.

To put it in plainer terms, you’ll be managing the team that writes and supports the software systems that manage MultiChoice Group VOD content (e.g., DStv’s CatchUp and BoxOffice) as well as encryption of OTT services. Your systems will read the schedules, fetch the original video file, compress that into the various formats for the different decoders and online apps. Your systems will also encrypt that with an array of technologies from Irdeto’s own conditional access systems, to Google’s Widevine and other DRMs too. Then, you wonder, how does a BoxOffice movie get onto my decoder? Your systems do that, slicing it up to stream it over the satellite in accordance with a strict playout schedule to ensure the movie arrives at the decoder at the right time. BoxOffice movies also need to get online, so you’ll be pushing those to the CDN too. Users want to rent that BoxOffice movie, and you’re the one that encrypted it, so your systems will have to be always-on (and your team on-call) to provide them the decryption keys too.

The Ideal person has strong technical capabilities, will thrive in a fast-paced high energy environment, is proactive and passionate about delivering world-class deployment and support services to customers; and will work closely with Irdeto Service delivery teams and other key stakeholders within Irdeto, our partners and customers and ensure a high level of customer satisfaction.

What you will be working on:

• Collaborate across the tech value chain to influence the business on the appropriate technical solution & the range of strategic technical choices to be made.
• Strategically & operationally monitor the performance of products and services (all applications) – ensuring ongoing optimization & service improvements.
• Ensure solution designs deliver on key technical principles of: maintainability, repeatability, testability, scalability & resilience.
• Design, implement and guide quality development practices and processes through an in-depth understanding of: automated testing, continuous integration, continuous delivery, devops deployment strategies.
• Recruit, manage, and grow testers, engineers, architects, and project managers.
• Empower and motivate team members to grow and build their career.
• Ensure staff are suitably trained to perform all job functions, and suitably use project and software related tools.
• Lead the team to meet deadlines, be accountable and independently determine solutions for complex issues.
• Support product roadmaps and present practical input for strategic technology decisions.
• Foster culture of continuous engineering improvement through mentoring, feedback, and metrics.
• Manage and prioritize the workload of staff and set measurable objectives for the team and guide/help them to achieve the goals.
• Manage continuing support and provide system metrics for client facing products.
• Develop customised solutions and/or improvements for new and existing customers.
• Drive project initiatives to deliver robust and cost-effective solutions incorporating new technologies/Irdeto products as appropriate.
• Work closely with Product Managers, Business Analysts, Architects and Operational staff to define business requirements, develop and document technical solutions, and provide engineering estimates for planning
• Work closely with other Development Managers, Engineers, and Technical Project Managers across the company to influence product development to support or enhance products and services.
• Good communication and collaboration with the team, peer group and senior management.

Knowledge and Skills, we hope you bring:

• Master’s degree in computer science, Electrical Engineering, or related technical degree or equivalent experience.
• Experience in technical design, software development or solution delivery.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to develop and maintain professional internal and external relationships that meet Irdeto’s core values. Skills in conflict resolution, constructive criticism, active listening.
• Decision-making skills with the ability to understand relative priorities, impact, and risk to ensure the right thing gets done at the right time.
• Leadership skills to ensure that the thing gets done right. This includes “soft” skills in empathy, mentoring, fostering collaboration and team building, career development, fostering a customer focus and creative thinking; as well as the “hard” skills of negotiating, process definition, planning, management, and execution.
• Well-versed in all aspects of the SDLC including requirements capture, coding standards, software design, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
• Experience with the SDLC and post-launch production support; and experience with iterative software development life-cycle methodologies and frameworks such as Agile, SCRUM, DevOps, SRE etc.
• Experience in working with highly collaborative teams with lots of service interdependencies.
• Experience in broadcast or online video streaming engineering and operations – content ingest, management, delivery, and playout.
• Highly competent user of the Microsoft suite of Office applications including Excel, Word and PowerPoint to generate budgets, documentation and proposals/presentations.
• In-depth knowledge of networking and IP content delivery technologies and systems
• Knowledge of digital media transcoding, encoding, and streaming systems
• Knowledge of SQL and popular database software such like SQL Server and MySQL
• Experience in Linux configuration and administration.
• Experience with remote monitoring & dashboarding tools such as Grafana, ELK or Splunk
• Experience in a DevOps environment with a demonstrable working knowledge of continuous integration and deployment
• Excellent technical writing ability and presentation skills.

What you can expect from us: 

Our people and culture are the heart of our business, and our values of Trust, Accountability, Agility and Innovation inform what we do, and how we work. We believe in investing in our talented employees and promote collaboration, creativity and innovation, health and well-being across our global workforce. 
  
In addition to competitive remuneration and extensive benefits we offer: 

• An international and multicultural environment where diversity and inclusivity are celebrated and embraced  
• Professional educational opportunities and training program 
• Innovation sabbatical 
• Volunteer Day 
• State of the art office space 
• On the job coaching and mentoring 
• Flexible work arrangements – via our Work Hard Anywhere policy. 
• Some of us run city marathons and even go on snowboarding trips together! 
• Casual Friday? Casual every day! 
•  US$ 500 net for your home office setup after you passed your trial period
• And many additional perks customized to global locations (canteen, fresh fruit, amazing coffee, parking, on-site gym, yoga room to name a few) 

Irdeto encourages applications from people with disabilities, as we provide accommodation on request of the candidates that take part in all aspects of the selection processes.

Welcome to Irdeto!

Irdeto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.