Service Manager - Cash And Liquidity Platforms

Role       : Service Manager - Cash & Liquidity Platforms

Location : Abu Dhabi

Role Purpose:

• A full-time role that will handle many complex/critical projects for ADIB. He will be leading the Solution Design, Architecture, Integration and Solutions delivery for the long-term strategic initiatives, specifically for top end governments & large corporate customers. Considering critical long term initiatives for governments, large corporate, wholesale and business banking systems with the current resource capacity there is a growing technical debt that requires comprehensive full proof solution. 

• He will be responsible for overall architecture design of critical solutions for wholesale banking, global transaction banking, risk, and treasury. He will lead the solution design to arrest any gap and look for futuristic state of art solution design to cover the longer run and capability.

• Managed end-to-end WBG and BBD applications integrations with upstream and downstream systems.
• Provide technical WBG and BBD product solutioning, gathering their feedback and requirements for future system enhancement.
• Collaborate with IT and other stakeholders to optimize the enhancements of the user experience with continuous integration and agile delivery practices Implement consistent and responsive user experience by collaborating with Design and Product teams. 
• Manage Projects and Major tasks rollout in WBG and BBD, coordinate with vendors, business users and other stake holders to articulate and document business requirements, change requests, Data Gap Resolution Strategy and Data Feeder module design and development required for WBG projects from various banking source systems.
• Ensured compliance with security, risk, legal, regulations, project management practices and audit as well as business continuity principles. Ownership for maintaining GRC Matrix complied for department as per Bank needs.
• Must have In-depth knowledge of the WBG and BBD Products and Services.

• Facilitate and UAT of projects, CRs by adhering to Quality control policies and guidelines.

• Support “go-live’ and post ‘go-live’ activities for projects and any releases to production.

• Own deployment, validation and environment readiness for all WBG platform releases, including Azure cloud provisioning, CI/CD pipeline execution, Kubernetes operations, performance tuning, DR/resiliency validation, data migration and end-to-end integration across Core Banking, Payments and enterprise systems.

Key Accountabilities of the role

1. Understand Business Expectations: Understand current business issues, objectives, and expectations from IT. Ensure that requirements are understood, managed, communicated and their status agreed on and approved. Manage expectations by ensuring that business units understand priorities, dependencies, financial constraints, and the need to schedule requests. Understand the current business environment, process constraints or issues, geographical expansion or contraction, and industry /regulatory drivers. 
2. Delivery Management and Communication: Facilitate Development of project charter, resource, and time estimation, oversee projects at the various stages along with effective team management, milestone tracking, risk management, preventive and corrective actions. Ensures that periodic updates are sent to stakeholders.
3. Relationship Management: Engage with Business units on periodic basis and act as single point of contact (SPOC) for IT Requirement handling. Address business escalations by working with internal stakeholders and vendors. Have periodic meeting to discuss key strategic initiatives, product enhancements and roadmap, provide information on new technology trends. Team Leader is accountable to ensure that actions are assigned and completed as per agreedplan. 
4. Recommend new and innovative technology ideas to business that supports business growth and revenue.
5. Application Vendor Management:  Team Leader to ensure periodic Vendor meetings are held with proper MoM that covers discussion points, decision points and actions. Team Leader is accountable to ensure that actions are assigned and completed as per agreed plan. He is responsible for managing RFP creation, Vendor identification, Vendor proposal evaluation, Contracting, Scope articulation, Vendor on-boarding, Vendor project management.
   1. Application management: Team Leader ensure that Application Profile is built and kept up to date. Ensure that application documentation is maintained in library. Team Leader is accountable to oversee application health in terms utilization, performance, availability, issues/defects, changes, vendor support, etc. The main activities related to application management that is monitored are as follows:
   2. Service Requests: Team Leader is accountable for proper assignment, planning, tracking, update and closure of all Service Requests assigned to his/her Assignment Group.
   3. Change Requests: Team Leader is accountable for proper assignment, planning, tracking, update and closure of all Change Requests assigned to his/her Assignment Group. Team Leader Accountable for reporting rollout immediately upon implementation.
   4. Problem Tickets: Team Leader is accountable for reviewing recurring incidents and logging/reporting it as Problem(s) in required format to be logged in Service Desk as per Problem Management process. 
   5. Incidents Tickets: Team Leader is accountable for proper assignment, planning, tracking, update and closure of all Incidents assigned to his/her Assignment Group within the specified SLA. Team Leader is accountable to immediately report major incidents/ systems failures/ outages to ITOps/NOC for further escalations along with required details, also Team Leader is accountable for escalating the same to Head by any means available. Review work-arounds and assess to promote an incident to problems. As P1 should be logged in Arclogic as per defined format. Team Leader is responsible to provide the required information as per the prescribed format for P1 incidents.
   6. Closure of VA and PT findings: Team Leader is accountable to ensure that a plan is in place to process  VA Assessments/Penetration Testing wherever applicable and supervise the closure of VA/PT findings, assigned and executed on time in order to close all the findings against the plan.
6. Platform Engineering, Release Readiness & Integration Management: Team Leader is accountable for the technical readiness, stability and resilience of all WBG platforms across environments. The main activities are as follows:
   1. Release Deployment & Environment Readiness: Team Leader is accountable for deployment, validation and environment readiness (DEV, SIT, UAT, Pre-Production and Production) for all WBG platform releases, ensuring environments are configured, version-aligned and signed off prior to each release.
   2. Azure Cloud Provisioning & Configuration: Oversee provisioning and configuration of Azure cloud resources for WBG platforms in line with Bank security, architecture and cost governance standards.
   3. CI/CD Pipeline Execution: Govern execution of CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins), ensuring controlled, traceable and repeatable build and deployment practices.
   4. Kubernetes Operations: Manage Kubernetes (AKS/EKS) cluster configuration, scaling and pod optimization to ensure availability, performance and efficient resource utilization.
   5. Log Analysis & Monitoring: Lead log analysis using Azure Monitor, ELK, Dynatrace and Splunk to proactively detect issues, support root-cause analysis and reduce incident resolution time.
   6. Performance Tuning: Drive performance tuning for APIs, SQL and microservices to meet agreed SLAs and non-functional requirements.
   7. DR & Resiliency: Plan and execute DR drills, failover testing and resiliency validation, ensuring alignment with Bank business continuity and regulatory requirements.
   8. End-to-End Integration Management: Own end-to-end integration across ERP, Core Banking, Payments, AML/FIRCO, Finance, UAEFTS, SWIFT, FileNet, CSM, ATM, CLMS, DMS and SMS/Email, covering interface design, testing, monitoring and issue resolution.
   9. Data Migration & Database Optimization: Lead data migration activities and Oracle SQL performance optimization for the Eximbills schema and SCF database, ensuring data integrity, reconciliation and query efficiency.

7. Unit Management: Team Leader is responsible to conduct periodic Team Meetings covering unit activities, projects, tasks, tickets, issues, problems, etc. As Team Leader, the key main functions is as follows:

   Goals: Unit head is responsible to actively contribute in achieving Goals and take necessary action.

   Dashboard: Team Leader is responsible to submit a monthly dashboard highlighting unit’s performance during the month, covering Service Desk interactions, Projects, Major Tasks, Availability & Performance of applications, outages, etc.

   Leave Management: Team Leader is accountable to ensure a leave plan is in place for all his subordinates (Staff & Outsourced) while ensuring proper backup is always available.

   Training / Career Planning: Team Leader is accountable to identify relevant trainings for their staff provides the plan, ensuring their enrollment, and attendance.

   Team Leaders are accountable to ensure that the Staff have completed all mandatory trainings announced from time to time.

   Documentation Reviews (Standard, Procedure, Forms, Templates), Updates and awareness: Team Leader is accountable to review and update documents owned by him/her or their team or provide valuable input to document owner. Team Leader is accountable to ensure that his unit members and vendors (including new joiner & vendors) are attending awareness sessions.  

   RCSA: Team Leader is responsible to review; activities performed by his unit, or applications owned by his unit or environment/ infrastructure associated with his application, and identify inherent risk, define controls and take necessary action to mitigate any identified issues.

   Control Testing: Team Leader is responsible for performing or actively participating in Control Testing, for controls owned by his Unit or supporting other units in their control testing. Team Leader is responsible to take required action to close Issues/Actions/Incidents in Arclogic that are a result of GAAR, ITCA, Control Testing, VA, Incidents, etc. Team Leader is responsible to report progress on periodic basis.

   Reports: Team Leader is responsible to timely provide required inputs for various reporting needs such as Daily Dashboard, GM Weekly Report, MBL, Weekly Report, MBR (Monthly Business Review) etc.,

Specialist Skills / Technical Knowledge Required for this role:

• Use appropriate verification techniques to manage changes in project scope, schedule, and costs.
• Technical/Functional understanding of assigned application portfolio.
• Measure project performance using appropriate systems, tools, and techniques.
• Report and escalate to management as needed.
• Manage the relationship with the client and all stakeholders.
• Perform risk management to minimize project risks.
• Establish and maintain relationships with third parties/vendors.
• Create and maintain comprehensive project documentation.
• Domain knowledge of the respective business domain that is supported.
• Supported implementation of different WBG and BBD products for local or multi-national banks 
• Hands-on knowledge of Azure Cloud provisioning and configuration, and Kubernetes (AKS/EKS) cluster management.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD tools: GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions and Jenkins.
• Proficiency in log analysis and monitoring tools: Azure Monitor, ELK, Dynatrace and Splunk.
• Performance tuning of APIs, SQL and microservices, including Oracle SQL optimization (Eximbills schema, SCF DB).
• DR drills, failover testing and resiliency validation practices.
• Integration knowledge across ERP, Core Banking, Payments, AML/FIRCO, Finance, UAEFTS, SWIFT, FileNet, CSM, ATM, CLMS, DMS and SMS/Email.
• Data migration planning, execution and reconciliation.
• Project Management and Delivery experience for Wholesale & Business Banking initiatives 
• Minimum 10+ years of relevant experience in banking domain.
• Strong experience in managing projects from initial phase to the closure with full adherence to PMI standards and methodologies.
• Proven ability to effectively assess and mitigate project risks and dependencies.
• Be a good team player with cross techno functional knowledge and skills.
• Excellent communications skills (written and verbal)
• Team management skills.
• Proven hands-on experience in cloud (Azure), CI/CD, Kubernetes, and release and environment management for banking platforms.
• Experience in data migration and Oracle database performance tuning for Trade Finance / SCF platforms.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, business administration, related field, or equivalent work experience