Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Unannounced Project

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At Blizzard Entertainment our Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) use systems expertise combined with software engineering patterns to help define create and support the architecture build systems orchestration and operations of services across the business. The role is composed of dedicated engineers that are focused on evangelizing reliability-as-a-feature through monitoring service-level objectives automation everything-as-code and testing.

Blizzards games and platforms reach a global audience of passionate gamers. The scale is massive and the challenges are very real but wise application of technology is the answer to keep it all running reliably with minimal guidance. Our Site Reliability Engineers are at the heart of this work working directly with the engineering teams from idea to launch to deliver the most epic (and reliable!) experiences... ever.

As an SRE at Blizzard you may find yourself

• Being part of an on-call rotation to assist finding a resolution during incidents
• Hosting blameless postmortems to share findings discover gaps embrace transparency and improve reliability across our services
• Building positive and collaborative relationships across the company
• Employing your systems knowledge to triage problems and tune resource usage
• Championing automation to reduce toil and increase development velocity
• Helping define and instrument Service-Level Objectives to ensure epic player experiences
• Demonstrating Configuration Management to build and maintain consistency across services
• Building Terraform configs to manage infrastructure in public and private clouds
• Supporting and improving build pipelines with Jenkins Argo and/or Spinnaker
• Adopting Containers and Kubernetes for new and existing services
• Applying everything-as-code methodologies across configuration infrastructure orchestration and elsewhere

You may succeed in this role if you

• Love to solve novel and exciting problems
• Dislike solving the same problems over-and-over- so you automate or eliminate them
• Are inspired to make everyones job easier by improving workflows
• Are comfortable digging through metrics logs and whatever else is available to triage and fix an incident at any time
• Strive to be better smarter and faster tomorrow than you are today
• Enjoy trying new technologies to improve what were doing today
• Are okay using older technologies that may not be perfect but are good enough and low maintenance
• Naturally spread the philosophies and practices of DevOps to others
• Like to collaborate with others to solve problems share knowledge and provide feedback
• Can self-assess the needs of a system or team and make a case to prioritize that work
• Relish working with software network cloud and systems engineers to solve problems across all tiers of the stack
• Help your peers succeed as much as you can

Types of projects you may work on

• Managing services and infrastructure supporting Blizzards incredible platforms and games
• Defining the future of running services for our platforms and games with Kubernetes
• Supporting our massive global data platforms across multiple clouds
• Performing and improving service migrations from one cloud/data center to another
• Working closely with our incubation teams to help define how future products should operate
• Integrating monitoring and logging with systems to improve observability and enable Service-Level Objectives
• Designing and completing stress tests to validate scale expectations vs reality

Areas of Expertise for an SRE at Blizzard

SREs at Blizzard are expected to become experts in the technologies used by the teams they are working with. Below is a non-exhaustive list of technologies SREs may be exposed to:

• Service-Level Objectives (SLI SLO SLA Error Budget Burn Rate)
• Distributed Systems (architectures hybrid environments high-availability)
• Configuration Management (Puppet Hiera Terraform Ansible)
• Container Computing (Docker Kubernetes)
• Cloud Services and Architecture (AWS GCP OpenStack)
• Distributed Message Bus (RabbitMQ Kafka)
• Proxies and Load Balancing (Nginx HAProxy ELB ALB)
• Monitoring (Prometheus Kibana Grafana Elasticsearch)
• Logging (Splunk SysLog ELK Stack Linux Journal)
• Source Control (GitHub Enterprise Perforce)
• CI/CD (Jenkins Argo)
• Linux (bash debugging performance tuning)
• Networking (triaging packet loss routing)
• Programming (Python Go C Shell)

Minimum qualifications of a Senior SRE at Blizzard:

• General knowledge of all areas of expertise and deep knowledge of four areas of expertise
• Follows technology trends and industry standards passionately
• Capable of presenting ideas and technology to a broad audience in a clear and effective way
• Builds strong relationships with their partner teams and other SREs
• Eager to help others achieve their goals
• Co-owns operations and reliability with the partner team
• Demonstrates deep understanding of the services they support and their goals
• Explores new technologies with demos/experiments/labs
• Breaks down complex work into small units of work for themselves or others