IT Product Specialist

Requisition ID # 144226

Job Category: Information Technology

Job Level: Individual Contributor

Business Unit: Information Technology

Work Type: Hybrid

Job Location: Oakland

Department Overview

Information Systems Technology Services is a unified organization comprised of various departments which collaborate effectively in order to deliver high quality technology solutions.

The Digital Workplace Team, part of the Infrastructure and Cloud Services organization, helps enable joy at work through the delivery of devices, collaboration platforms, and support services designed to empower our coworker's productivity through reliability, quality, and speed of response.

Position Summary

The role of the IT Product Specialist is to manage the entire lifecycle of assigned IT product(s) or service(s). Major responsibilities include collaborating with key stakeholders in the selection process, developing detailed system designs from requirements, contract management, vendor management, capacity management, contributing to future direction and roadmaps, escalated support and product consulting, and documentation.

The IT Product Specialist / Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Administrator's role is to ensure the stability, integrity, and efficient operation of the existing on-premise VDI environments. This is achieved by monitoring, maintaining, and supporting all 75 VxRail nodes as well as over 4000 end users' sessions within the environment. The VDI Administrator will apply proven communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills to help identify and resolve issues in order to best serve customers.

This role will support the day to day operations managing our on-premise VDI infrastructure. This position requires dynamic functional area support and collaboration. Resource also participates in team brainstorming/ troubleshooting sessions as well as an on-call rotation schedule.

PG&E is providing the salary range that the company in good faith believes it might pay for this position at the time of the job posting. This compensation range is specific to the locality of the job. The actual salary paid to an individual will be based on multiple factors, including, but not limited to, specific skills, education, licenses or certifications, experience, market value, geographic location, and internal equity. We would not anticipate that the individual hired into this role would land at or near the top half of the range described below, but the decision will be dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

A reasonable salary range is:

Bay Area Minimum: $93,000.00

Bay Area Maximum: $139,000.00

&/OR

California Minimum: $88,000.00

California Maximum: $132,000.00

This position is hybrid, working from your remote office and your assigned location based on business need.

Job Responsibilities

• Performs product management duties for the VDI virtualization environment.
• Contribute to the continuous product lifecycle from research, planning and implementation to retirement.
• Develops technical competence in VDI virtualization technologies, computing, security, and networking.
• Perform autonomously with consulting a more senior Product Specialist on increasing complex or sensitive products or services.
• Partner with peers in the accountable planning organization to understand the strategic vision and how it applies to the targeted products or services.
• Understand the industry's virtualization product positioning, the product's key benefits, and the product's targeted users.
• Partner with peers on the evaluation of new market technologies.
• Demonstrate full technical competence within the general areas of computing or network.
• Understand and analyze a project's business and technical requirements.
• Collaborate with peers to translate requirements into a detailed solution design that teams can leverage to properly deploy and implement.
• Document design specifications, installation instructions, configuration manuals, procedure manuals, and other system-related information.
• Be able to provide accurate project timelines, labor and materials cost estimates to the project.
• Work with projects to determine the best use of existing technology capacity for resource allocation.
• Perform contract management and be responsible for understanding and complying with the product's existing maintenance contracts and/or licenses.
• Assists with processing Help Desk escalation requests in solving various coworker issues.
• In the absence of a third-tier support specialist, perform the role of third-tier support to other IT professionals.
• Participate in business, technical, and contract negotiations with vendors.
• Act as a conduit for vendor relationship, licensing, and incident management.
• Acts as a liaison between various departments, stakeholders, and business partners for VDI environments and technology.
• Contributes to a variety of documentation such as strategies, plans, designs, usage or configuration standards, policies, guidelines, user requirements, roadmaps, reports, metrics, process manuals, configuration manuals, and other documentation specific and necessary for the targeted product or service.
• Available to support 24/7 on-call rotation work at least one week every month.
• Practice and promote a safety culture.

Qualifications

Minimum:

• Associates Degree in Computer Science or job-related discipline or equivalent experience
• Job-related technical experience, 2 years

Desired:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or job-related discipline or equivalent experience
• Job-related technical experience, 3 years
• Utility industry experience, regulated
• Create and manage multiple configurations of virtual machines using strong knowledge of vSphere and the VMware stack.
• Experience deploying and managing virtualization technologies integrated with the commercial cloud (Citrix, Azure, AWS, etc.).
• Develops tools, scripts and frameworks of moderate complexity that drive efficiency in automation and management of current environments.
• Knowledge of common application and security protocols
• Recognizes and prioritizes product work based on customer needs, product feedback, industry trends, aligning to technical and organizational strategy, and understanding current and future requirements
• Excellent written and verbal communication and interpersonal skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Collaborates effectively across functional teams
• Defines and launch minimum viable products, adding key features/requirements incrementally.
• Provides direction and facilitates with support teams and vendors for problem management and vulnerability remediation.
• Demonstrates knowledge of root cause analysis, continuous improvement/change management tools, and techniques.
• Maintains vendor relationships, strong understanding of product licensing and participating in Business Review meetings.
• Collaborates with other peer IT Product Specialists across various technologies to ensure smooth and reliable operation of the environment.
• Communicates (oral and written) recommendations and findings to senior leaders and business end-users.
• Identifies the appropriate customer audience, their preferred communication channels, and feedback collection.
• Develops messaging and change management material for business leaders and end users.
• Owns, manages and prioritizes a list of new and backlog items with regular refinement sessions.
• Organizes, produces, and reports on the progress of ongoing testing, trials, and evaluation of new products and services.
• Develops and documents detailed technical knowledge of the configuration, operation, and diagnostic of products while maintaining familiarity with competing products