IT Enterprise Solutions Engineer - ERP

Position: IT Enterprise Solutions Engineer - ERP

Position Type: Full time

Department : Information Technology

Location: Salt River, Cape Town, South Africa

Experience: 7+ years with a degree in Information Technology/Systems

Company Description:

Watchmaker Genomics is a global life sciences company with R&D and production facilities in Cape Town, South Africa, and headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. Our team is driven by a passion for innovation and a commitment to collaboration, creativity, and scientific rigor. We believe that the intersection of biology, engineering, and computer science offers exciting opportunities to develop novel technologies that advance research and enhance human health. We leverage our enzyme engineering and computational biology capabilities to develop products that support high-growth applications in genomics, molecular diagnostics, and personalized medicine.

Position Description:

Watchmaker Genomics is inviting applications for an on site, full time position of an IT Enterprise Solutions Engineer - ERP in our Cape Town office. This position reports to the Director of Global IT, will own the full lifecycle of our Epicor Kinetic ERP platform and its integrated application estate, and will play a pivotal role in facilitating effective communication and collaboration between the IT department and various business units within our organization. This role is responsible for understanding business needs, aligning technology solutions, and ensuring the successful implementation, stabilization, optimization, and utilization of our ERP, MES and other related systems to support the achievement of our strategic goals, including planning and executing new phased rollouts of modules, integrations, sites and entities. The IT Enterprise Solutions Engineer - ERP will be a key advocate for leveraging technology to enhance operational efficiency and drive business outcomes.

The role extends to overseeing system architecture design and integration planning. By collaborating closely with IT architects, technical teams, and external partners, this individual ensures that the enterprise system's architecture is robust, scalable, and aligned with the organization's technology strategy. Moreover, their expertise in integration design guarantees seamless data exchange between internal and external systems, fostering efficient workflows and enhancing business operations. Beyond design, the role owns the day-to-day operation of the ERP platform and its integration estate, including environment and release management, security and access administration, data operations, reporting and controlled document output, and incident management through stabilization and hypercare periods.

The successful candidate will thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced working environment and contribute directly to our company culture and success. This position will offer unique challenges, learning and growth including the opportunity to implement global solutions. The role supports both our Boulder (US) and Cape Town (South Africa) sites across time zones, with periodic travel for phased rollouts and on site support weeks, and after-hours availability during cutover windows, hypercare periods and month end.

Responsibilities:

Business Requirements Analysis

• Collaborate with business stakeholders to gather, analyze, and document enterprise system requirements based on functional and operational needs;
• Translate business needs into actionable technology solutions and system configurations;
• Provide expert advice and guidance to business units on how to best leverage chosen systems to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and achieve business objectives;
• Identify opportunities for process improvements and recommend enterprise software solutions.

System Architecture Design

• Collaborate with IT architects and technical teams to design the overarching architecture of enterprise systems to be implemented in the organization;
• Ensure that the system architecture aligns with the organization's long term technology strategy and supports scalability, reliability, and security;
• Provide input and recommendations for technology stack, database design, and infrastructure components;
• Liaise with solution architects to align enterprise system architecture with broader enterprise architecture principles.

Integration Definitions, Planning, and Design (Internal and External)

• Define integration requirements for connecting ERP systems with other internal systems such as MES, CRM, and financial systems;
• Collaborate with cross functional teams to identify integration touchpoints and data exchange needs;
• Design integration workflows, data mapping, and transformation processes;
• Evaluate integration technologies and tools to select the most suitable solutions for seamless data flow;
• Develop integration plans, including timelines, resource allocation, and testing strategies;
• Collaborate with external partners, vendors, and third-party systems to define integration requirements and protocols;
• Ensure data security, integrity, and compliance standards are maintained throughout the integration process;
• Monitor and troubleshoot integration issues, and work with relevant teams to implement timely resolutions;
• Establish documentation for integration processes, data flows, and troubleshooting procedures;

ERP Platform and Environment Lifecycle Management

• Administer the Epicor Kinetic environment estate, including LIVE, TEST and DEV environment management and refreshes, backup and restore verification, and version and patch management aligned to tested baselines;
• Maintain deployment registers for customizations, BPM directives, Epicor Functions and configuration changes, and monitor scheduled processes and system agent health;
• Operate monitoring and alerting for applications, databases, print and integration services.

Integration Estate Operations

• Own daily interface health for finance, tax, banking, shipping and carrier integrations (Concur, FNB, JP Morgan, Avalara, QuickShip and others), including failed message alerting and retry and replay procedures;
• Maintain interface reconciliation reports and resolve exceptions with the responsible business owners;
• Manage integration credentials, endpoints, certificate and token renewal registers.

Security and Access Lifecycle

• Administer user provisioning, licensing, security groups, menu security and field level security, with periodic access reviews and segregation of duties checks;
• Control restricted tooling, manage service accounts and the secrets register, and maintain change logs on regulated tables.

Data Operations and Master Data Governance Support

• Execute controlled data loads and corrections (DMT) and support the data correction request process within agreed SLAs;
• Maintain data quality dashboards and cross references and coordinate with master data domain owners to keep the ERP the single source of truth.

Reporting and Controlled Document Output

• Develop and maintain the report catalog, BAQs and dashboards (SSRS), and manage the report request backlog;
• Control label templates and the printer estate, including customer specific variants, in line with approved masters and label control requirements.

Incident, Problem and Hypercare Management

• Operate severity-based triage with defined SLAs and escalation paths to vendor support and implementation partners;
• Define and verify hypercare exit criteria for every rollout and convert recurring incidents into permanent fixes and knowledge base content.

Cutover and Phased Rollout Execution

• Own cutover playbooks and runbooks, data load sequencing, dress rehearsals, go or no go gates, command center operation, staged restart plans, and offline transaction capture with same day back entry controls;
• Plan and deliver the phased rollout ba