Lead- IT USA

First Solar reserves the right to offer you a role most applicable to your experience and skillset.

Basic Job Functions:

Responsible for coordinating First Solar's North American Network Infrastructure Operations team which provides 24 x 365 proactive and reactive support, project resources, and customer service. Oversees day-to-day activities in the project, support, and area. Responsible for improvements to the performance, availability, and stability of the supported environments. Resolves resource and schedule conflicts to ensure all project requirements are met. Handles incidents, problems and is the management escalation point for associates. Ensures that procedures and policies are executed properly. Responsible for reporting and tracking metrics to support the success of the organization. Works with team to meet and exceed business targets.

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology or related field or equivalent years of work experience
• Minimum 7 years of related work experience
• 1 - 3 years of team lead and/or supervisory experience

Required Skills/Competencies:

• 7 - 9 years of experience in IT support, operations, or related field
• Experience in a 24/7/365 environment
• Some experience with supporting and managing a Cloud platform, preferably Azure
• Demonstrated experience with deploying, supporting and general operation activities of a Cisco production environment including switches, routers, firewalls, VPN devices, QoS, wireless solutions and peripherals and performance monitoring
• Demonstrated ability to monitor and improve both uptime and availability for major systems
• Demonstrated ability to adhere to change management processes and reduce risk for changes in the supported environments
• Demonstrated ability to manage infrastructure globally
• Demonstrated ability to communicate and affect global, virtual teams
• Demonstrated leadership experience in either formal or informal capacity
• Understanding the Service Now system and general incident, change and problem processes
• Ability to manage financial requirements and meet OPEX and CAPEX budget requirements
• Demonstrated ability to design system reliability including high availability, failover, and disaster recovery
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple, high value, critical projects and resources at the same time
• Ability to work in a high pressure, fast paced environment
• Knowledge of business environments and IT alignment with critical business functions
• Familiarity with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance activities and controls
• Familiarity with resource management and project management. Ability to manage multiple project and resource requirements
• Understanding and experience with ITIL Foundations terminology and processes
• Proven ability to support server/storage hardware and software technologies
• Customer service skills
• Excellent written and oral communication and organization skills
• Critical thinking and problem-solving skills
• Understanding of problem management (PBI) processes
• Supervisory and coaching skills
• Significant SAN switch/fabric experience.
• Ability to define/document and ensure compliance of IT SOX policies and procedures
• Must be able to work self-sufficiently in a fast paced, changing environment
• Individual must be flexible and able to adapt to changing priorities and/or incomplete requirements
• Must be able to work various hours and weekends to meet business needs
• Some travel may be required
• Experience with Cisco, Riverbed, F5, Palo Alto products.
• Working knowledge of Cloud Services (SaS, IaaS, PaaS) a plus.
• Ability to design high availability infrastructure with proper capacity using flexible infrastructure principles.
• Basic understanding of deploying and configuring network monitoring tools like Orion or ThousandEyes is a plus
• Some experience wotj network and internet protocols and applications including WINS, DNS, DHCP, TCP/IP, IIS, SNMP, SMTP, Routing, BGP, E/IGRP, H.323, Link Aggregation, Network Redundancy, PEAP, Spanning Tree and VLans utilizing a fiber/copper/MPLS backbone.

Key Competencies:

• Promotes and ensures use of appropriate techniques, methodologies and tools.
• Collects and uses feedback from customers and stakeholders to help measure effectiveness of stakeholder management. Helps develop and enhance customer and stakeholder relationships. Implements a communications strategy, including, for example, handling of complaints; problems and issues; managing resolutions; corrective actions and lessons learned; collection and dissemination of relevant information appropriately.
• Reviews potential new hire candidate details, manages selection processes, and ensures that account is taken of relevant statutory or external regulations, standards and codes of good practice. Ensures that all relevant parties are informed of the results of interviews and other decisions
• Determines the required outcomes for learning or development, from organizational development needs and the training strategy. Mentors assigned practitioners, ensuring alignment with predetermined statements of required development outcomes. Assists each practitioner with the creation of development plans based on the outcome statements. Ensures that each practitioner records evidence of progress. Validates practitioners' records at the end of each cycle of planned development, to ensure that achievements and enhanced capabilities are recorded and referenced to the outcome statements. May contribute to practitioners' performance appraisals.
• Ensures that all IT financial targets are met and examines any areas where budgets and expenditure exceed their agreed tolerances. Assists with the definition and operation of effective financial control and decision making, especially in the areas of service, projects and component cost models and the allocation and apportionment of all incurred IT costs.
• Advises on different procurement routes to acquire services and products. Gathers information and uses appropriate techniques to assess benefits and options and make decisions about the procurement.
• Acts as the routine contact point between organization and supplier. Collects and reports on supplier performance data.
• Assists in the collection and reporting on supplier performance data. Assists with the routine day to day communication between the organization and suppliers.

Essential Responsibilities:

Primary Responsibilities:

• Adheres to all safety procedures and good housekeeping standards
• Provides availability and uptime to match customer requirements for all environments.
• Understands the ability to monitor highly technical environments to ensure availability.
• Supervises scheduling and day to day activities for IT Infrastructure Operations employees.
• Responsible for managing support queues.
• Supervises support participation in components of most enterprise expansion activities.
• Delegates and sets priorities for team members. Provides guidance when needed.
• Works within the Service Desk System to maintain workflow and ticket reviews.
• Create documentation and diagrams for use by various team members within IT.
• Will participate in disaster recovery initiatives to ensure business continuity.
• Use logical approach to troubleshooting and problem mitigation.
• Foster and maintain good business relationships with executives, management and inter/intra departmental teams.
• Promotes and supports ITIL processes and ITSM service delivery model.
• Works with global management team to provide technical guidance, project management, and overall resource management
• Creates a positive team atmosphere.
• Participates in and may lead projects.
• Comfortable making decisions and understand ramifications to the enterprise.
• Is the primary escalation point for North American Network team if guidance is needed or if customers have a concern.
• Updates Manager and other key stakeholders of incidents or other activities of significance.
• Supports goals of IT and business.
• Exercises effective communication levels and fosters team building.
• Other duties as assigned.

Reporting Relationships:

• This position will report to the IT manager II.

Travel:

• If hiring to a new plant prior to plant start, associate will be required to spend extended time (60-80%) in another plant in either Ohio or Alabama for training until their assigned plan starts equipment installation.

Estimated Salary Range:

• $106,000-$151,000 Annually

US Physical Requirements:

Office Physical Requirements:

All positions in our office require interaction with people and technology while either standing or sitting. To best service our customers, internal and external, all associates must be able to communicate face-to-face and on the phone with or without reasonable accommodation. First Solar is committed to compliance with its obligations under all applicable state and federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination. In keeping with this commitment, it attempts to reasonably accommodate applicants and employees in accordance with the requirements of the disability discrimination laws. It also invites individuals with disabilities to participate in a good faith, interactive process to identify reasonable accommodations that can be made without imposing an undue hardship.

Potential candidates will meet the education and experience requirements provided on the above job description and excel in completing the listed responsibilities for this role. All candidates receiving an offer of employment must successfully complete a background check and any other tests that may be required.

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement: First Solar is an Equal Opportunity Employer that values and respects the importance of a diverse and inclusive workforce. It is the policy of the company to recruit, hire, train and promote persons in all job titles without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity. We recognize that diversity and inclusion is a driving force in the success of our company.