This job listing expired on Nov 7, 2023
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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 consists of dedicated engineers who focus on evangelizing reliability-as-a-feature through monitoring, testing, setting service-level objectives, implementing everything-as-code, and automating processes.

Blizzard’s Production Technology group has a unique challenge from our other SRE teams. This team is not embedded on our product teams as our other SRE teams are. This central team is highly focused on developing technology standards and reference frameworks that are utilized by all of Blizzard. There is a heavy emphasis on maintaining a very strong understanding of the individual requirements and use cases throughout the company in order to develop standards and solutions that fit a wide variety of services. You will be working closely with engineers and product personnel from around the company to develop, test, validate, and ultimately roll-out new solutions and standards to deliver the most epic (and reliable!) experiences... ever.

This role is a hybrid work position, with some work on-site and some work-from-home. The potential home studio for this role is 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.

As an SRE at Blizzard, you may find yourself…

  • Being part of an on-call rotation to assist finding a resolution during incidents

  • Leveraging your distributed systems and microservice expertise to perform targeted R&D efforts

  • Distilling a wide variety of requirements into a comprehensive set of solutions

  • Building positive and collaborative relationships across the company

  • Championing automation to reduce toil and increase development velocity

  • Setting Blizzard up for success by baking in reliability and observability as 1st class features

  • Building Terraform configs to manage infrastructure in public and private clouds

  • Supporting and improving build pipelines with Jenkins, Argo, Github, etc.

  • Reducing friction for our teams to modernize and onboard to our solutions

  • 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 harden and optimize our solutions

  • Strive to be better, smarter, and faster tomorrow - than you are today

  • Enjoy trying new technologies to improve what we're doing today

  • Enjoy thinking about the big picture view of a technology ecosystem

  • 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…

  • Regularly evaluating Blizzard technology from a holistic perspective to identify areas for improvement

  • Gathering and digesting a wide set of requirements to incorporate into your solution and validation

  • Working closely with teams developing brand-new games to set them up for success

  • Working with existing product teams to develop strategies for them to adopt new standards

  • Regularly strategizing resource allocation and priorities

  • Integrating monitoring and logging systems to improve observability and enable adoption of 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 (SLO, SLA, SLI, Error Budget, Burn Rate)

  • Systems Architecture (distributed systems, microservices, HA and DR)

  • Configuration Management (Puppet, Hiera, Terraform, Ansible)

  • Container Orchestration (Kubernetes, OCI, Docker)

  • Cloud Computing (AWS, GCP, OpenStack, Hybrid)

  • 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)

  • Tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger)

  • Source Control (GitHub Enterprise, Perforce)

  • CI/CD (Jenkins, Argo)

  • Linux (bash, debugging, performance tuning)

  • Networking (triaging, packet loss, routing)

  • Programming (Python, Go, C++)

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

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.

Our World

At Blizzard Entertainment, we pour our hearts and souls into everything we create. Best known for iconic video game universes including Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and StarCraft, we’ve been creating genre-defining games for millions of players around the world for more than 30 years. We’re on a quest: bring our dreams to life and craft the most epic entertainment experiences…ever. Hard work, iteration and polish go into the Blizzard “secret recipe,” but the most important ingredients come from talented people who share our vision. If that sounds like you, join us.

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 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. This base pay range is for the U.S. and is not applicable to locations outside of the U.S. Actual amounts will vary depending on experience, performance and location. In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role may be eligible for incentive compensation. Incentive compensation is not guaranteed.