Head of Technology, Web Hosting

About Whogohost

Whogohost is a leading web hosting and domain registration company serving 100,000+ customers globally. Our origins began in Nigeria, West Africa where we have 90% of our clientele today and own the largest market share in domain and website hosting. We are the leading .ng domain registrar and continue to invest and expand beyond our first market, Nigeria.

Position

The HT will be responsible for successfully delivering Whogohost’s services by managing the technical risks and opportunities of the business. You are a custodian of our customers' continued trust in us for their critical application, email and web hosting needs. In this role, your team will be the first point of contact with our client base, and you will be personally responsible for ensuring the speedy investigation, resolution and escalation of technical issues for our various hosting products. The friendliness and efficiency of our support is something we are incredibly proud of, and it is a very important reason for our success and our rapid growth.

Job Duties

• Technical Leadership
  • Maintain updated servers with the latest patches - delegating to the executives and officers as necessary
  • Maintain Whogohost internal server and services requirements using best practices, including hardware, network, and virtualization
  • Develop and facilitate technical team training
  • Automate repetitive tasks with appropriate scripting languages and tools
• Leadership
  • Provide expert project leadership and guidance to the team
  • Support Whogohost's global strategic initiatives 
  • Manage team expectations regarding task assignments, work arrangements, and other department expectations
  • Develop and implement strategies with the team to identify technology directions, decisions, security policy, and road map
  • Provide encouragement to team members, including communicating team goals and identifying areas for new training or skill checks
  • Oversee the activities and performance of direct reports 
  • Provide direction, coaching, and mentorship to the team
  • Engage in the team's development by ok providing direction, mentorship, coaching, feedback, and identifying areas of growth and training opportunities
  • Set KPIs for the team 
  • Collaborate with and support the Abuse and Compliance team to improve the security and performance of the overall infrastructure

Additional Responsibilities includes:

• Operations management
  • Oversee shift scheduling, adherence and floor management
  • Keep an eye on individual and team efficiency
  • Send efficiency and shift reports to management every day/week
  • Take ownership of escalated issues of customers
  • Discover training needs and provide coaching and feedback to direct reports
  • Listen to team members feedback and resolve any issues or conflicts
  • Drive team engagement. Suggest and organize team building activities
  • Keep track and help achieve critical metrics/OKRs and report the same weekly to Management (CSAT, Efficiency Metrics, SLAs)
• Building a team
  • Conduct first round of interview with candidates
  • Control attrition
  • Oversee training processes for new joinees
• Training
  • Oversee functional training of employees
  • Track and report training periods and scores
  • Maintain data on the same and share with stakeholders
  • Continuously identify areas of improvement for associates and conduct sessions to bridge the gap
  • Share reports and team progress on a weekly basis
  • Conduct weekly/bi-weekly team meetings
  • Contribute in Product Planning
  • Maintain a list of features/requirements from the support side and share the same with Product Managers
  • Follow up on every quarter's data submitted and ensure the same is executed on time
  • Conduct performance reviews and annual appraisals
  • Conduct monthly, quarterly performance reviews for each team member
  • Assist Support Manager in recommending appraisals and promotions
  • Projects
  • Assist the manager in driving key metrics of the team like CSAT, SLA, FCR etc.
  • Build reports, analyze trends and draw inferences from them

Your qualification

• Multiple years of work experience in Server administration preferably in a web hosting company or PaaS company/unit
• You are highly technical, and can manage a team of technical and nontechnical people
• You are acquainted with / have mastered some of the below skills:
  • Operating Systems: Good understanding of Redhat based linux flavours & Windows 2008/2012 systems
  • Linux Skills: sed/awk/grep/egrep, VI/VIM, netstat, lsof, strace, ps/top/atop/dstat, grub boot config & systems rescue, fstab/disk labels, ext3/ext4, tcpdump/wireshark, IPtables, sysstat (sar/vmstat/iostat etc), run-levels & startup scripts, sudo/chkrootkit/rkhunter
  • Windows Skills: Basic Windows Systems administration, Sysinternals tools, Performance monitor, Event logs, Various MMC's, Terminal services, VNC etc
  • Fundamentals: Excellent DNS & Networking Fundamentals, TCP/UDP, IP Routing
  • Application Protocols: Excellent understanding of SMTP,HTTP,FTP,IMAP,POP
  • Control Panels: cPanel, Plesk, Virtuozzo, KVM, Hyper-V - Installation, configuration and customization
  • Applications: Exim, Postfix, Qmail, Apache (mod_php, mod_fcgid, CGI, php-fpm etc), Nginx, IIS (DotNet, PHP, ASP etc)
  • Scripting: Basic sh/bash, perl, ruby, python, Powershell, Batch, VBScript
  • Databases: Basic understanding of - SQL/RDBMS. Basics of MySQL, Postgres, MS-SQL. Configuring MySQL and postgreSQL servers
  • Soft skills: Strong customer support focus and decent english communication skills
  • Others: Regular expressions, Excellent troubleshooting skills

Will be a plus

• Certifications: RHCE, MCSE, CCNA 
• Experience in: OpenVZ, Parallels Plesk and cPanel administration
• Systems/Hardware: LOM/IPMI/IP KVMs, Dell Hardware
• Excel knowledge