Team Name:

Job Title:

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Requisition ID:

R023689

Job Description:

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.

Blizzard's 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 everyone's 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 we're 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 Blizzard's 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

This role is anticipated to be a hybrid work position, with some work on-site and some work-from-home. The potential home studio for this role is Albany, NY or Irvine, CA. However, we understand each person’s circumstances may be unique and will work with you to explore other possible options, including remote work arrangements.

Your Platform

Best known for iconic video game universes including Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, and StarCraft®, Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. (www.blizzard.com), a division of Activision Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), is a premier developer and publisher of entertainment experiences. Blizzard Entertainment has created some of the industry’s most critically acclaimed and genre-defining games over the last 30 years, with a track record that includes multiple Game of the Year awards. Blizzard Entertainment engages tens of millions of players around the world with titles available on PC via Battle.net®, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android.

Our World

Activision Blizzard, Inc., is one of the world's largest and most successful interactive entertainment companies and is at the intersection of media, technology and entertainment. We are home to some of the most beloved entertainment franchises including Call of Duty®, World of Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, Candy Crush™ and Bubble Witch™. Our combined entertainment network delights hundreds of millions of monthly active users in 196 countries, making us the largest gaming network on the planet!

Our ability to build immersive and innovative worlds is only enhanced by diverse teams working in an inclusive environment.  We aspire to have a culture where everyone can thrive in order to connect and engage the world through epic entertainment. We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered!

The videogame industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners.

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable assistance to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you are a disabled individual requiring an accommodation to apply for an open position, please email your request to [email protected]. General employment questions cannot be accepted or processed here. Thank you for your interest. 

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, among other characteristics. 

Rewards

We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for ‘Every World’ - we’ve got our employees covered!  Subject to eligibility requirements, the Company offers comprehensive benefits including:

• Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;
• 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;
• Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;
• Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;
• If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.

Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part time and temporary full-time employees and interns with the Company.  You can learn more by visiting https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/.

In the U.S., the standard base pay range for this role is $101,000.00 - $186,754.00 Annual. These values reflect the expected base pay range of new hires across all U.S. locations. Ultimately, your specific range and offer will be based on several factors, including relevant experience, performance, and work location. Your Talent Professional can share this role’s range details for your local geography during the hiring process. In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role may be eligible for incentive compensation. Incentive compensation is not guaranteed. While we strive to provide competitive offers to successful candidates, new hire compensation is negotiable.