Site Reliability Engineer

Team Name:
Job Title:
Site Reliability Engineer
Requisition ID:
R022076
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, ArgoCD, and Github
• 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, micro-services, high-availability, elections)
• Configuration Management (Puppet, Hiera, Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible)
• Container Computing (Docker, Kubernetes, Service Mesh)
• Cloud Services and Architecture (AWS, GCP, OpenStack)
• Distributed Message Bus (RabbitMQ, Kafka)
• Proxies and Load Balancing (Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy)
• Monitoring (Prometheus, Kibana, Grafana, Elasticsearch, Datadog)
• Logging (Splunk, SysLog, ELK Stack, Linux Journal, grep)
• Source Control (GitHub Enterprise, Perforce)
• CI/CD (Jenkins, Argo, Spinnaker)
• Linux (bash, debugging, tuning)
• Networking (triaging, packet loss, routing)
• Programming (Python, Go, C#, C++, Shell, PowerShell)

Expectations of a SRE at Blizzard:

• Familiar knowledge of all areas of expertise, general knowledge of 5 areas of expertise, deep knowledge of 2 areas of expertise
• Aware and enthusiastic of technology trends
• Capable of sharing ideas and technology to their peers in a clear and effective way
• Builds strong relationships with their immediate team and peers
• Creates new technical documentation on their own
• Participates in technical designs with guidance
• Demonstrates deep understanding of the services they support and their goals
• Completes complex well-defined tasks

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.
Accommodation Request: 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 accommodationrequests@activisionblizzard.com. 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 $37.26 - $68.93 Hourly. 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.