Vended Application Expert

At Allstate, great things happen when our people work together to protect families and their belongings from life’s uncertainties. And for more than 90 years our innovative drive has kept us a step ahead of our customers’ evolving needs. From advocating for seat belts, air bags and graduated driving laws, to being an industry leader in pricing sophistication, telematics, and, more recently, device and identity protection. 

Job Description

As a Vended Application Expert (Container Platform Engineer) you will be working within a fun, fast paced and challenging work environment. No two days are the same within this role, and the opportunity to work with emerging technologies is extremely rewarding.

The team has a great sense of humor and it’s good to be surrounded by like-minded technologists.

The team at Allstate a global platform group spread out across the US, India and Northern Ireland, made up of people with skills in a wide range of technologies including VMWare, Kubernetes, programming/scripting, AWS, Azure, and many more.

From a technology perspective we support a Kubernetes based CaaS solution, both OnPrem (VMWare) and Cloud Hosted (AWS), that is the core of Allstate’s future development strategy. There is a huge focus on automation and infrastructure as code to build and support these environments and the team uses a range of vended and open source tools to do so. Partnerships with other groups are also key and a typical day will see the team work with multiple other groups (including the ISAM, AWS, VMWare, Splunk, CI/CD Tools, Firewall, NOC, Jenkins, Yaml, Datadog and Security teams) further broadening the team’s knowledge.

With such a diverse range of technologies in use, the team is filled with experts who are there to help and support each other, spreading knowledge throughout the group. Teamwork is at the core of everything we do which provides a supportive and engaging working environment.

As technology moves forward the team is expected to be the first to embrace it and currently has the opportunity to plan and build out a new platform within the emerging Kubernetes technology stack backed by the necessary enterprise investment..

If you want to work in role which helps build your skillset, challenges you on a daily basis, and want to work within a collaborative work environment this would be the role for you.

Responsibilities include (but are not limited to):

• Oversee, engineer and develop Allstate’s Kubernetes Platform as a Service offering aligned to business strategies and requirements

• Design platform architecture with various cloud providers i.e., VMWare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, etc.

• Oversee, designs and manages the infrastructure and configuration of the platform and application environments with a focus on automation and infrastructure as code

• Leads a team’s engineering practices around test driven and continuous delivery of infrastructure

• Understands and incorporates application developer CI/CD experience as part of platform enablement to ensure ease of use

• Responsible for ensuring platform reliability and operational readiness as well as coaches’ team and application developers on hosting best practices for effective application resiliency and recoverability

• Evaluates performance trends and expected changes in demand and capacity; and establish the appropriate scalability plans

• Serves as an escalation point for any availability or performance issues at multiple layers of deployment, from hardware, operating environment, network and application

• Recommends and maintains technology related policies and procedures

• Contribute to technology strategy and engineering roadmaps around cloud platforms.

• Execute strategic engineering proof of concepts around cloud platforms

• Champion for the appropriate use of open source and commercial technology based upon industry trends and innovative concepts

• Mentor and share knowledge with team members

• Provision, configure, and maintain cloud resources using industry standard tools and technologies.

• Advocates and models coding and collaboration practices, reviews team code, and provides team members with feedback and suggestions for process improvement. 

Essential Criteria 

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience

• Minimum 5-8 years of related experience

• 8+ years of System Administration, Site Reliability Engineering, or DevOps Engineering experience

• Experience with the Administration of Platform as a Service/Container Orchestration software, such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Docker

• Advanced knowledge of the Administration of a Kubernetes or equivalent platform

• A strong understanding of Kubernetes workload architecture and design patterns

• Implement network security measures and ensure the integrity of the Kubernetes infrastructure.

• Provide guidance and expertise on network architecture and best practices for Kubernetes deployments.

• Demonstrable experience designing and implementing complex applications and distributed systems into private and public cloud infrastructure (AWS, vSphere, Azure, etc.)

• Experience with Terraform or Terraform Enterprise

• Hands-on experience with resilient cloud solutions at scale

• Proficiency in Linux command line interface and system administration tasks.

• Able to facilitate diverse teams across geographical boundaries, multi-task, and work under pressure to meet aggressive schedule targets

• Advanced knowledge and experience across multiple technologies in a single domain (Cloud, Security, DevOps, etc.)

• Intermediate level understanding of network protocols/functions (HTTP, HTTPS, SSL/TLS, SMTP, DNS)

• Proven experience working with infrastructure components (operating systems, compute, storage, networking, distributed systems, big data, cloud, containers, etc.) and solid understanding of the rest and how they impact services

• Expertise in problem solving and analyzing global scale distributed systems

• Clear and effective communication across multiple levels of the organization (i.e. peers, customers, executive leadership, etc.)

• You are a self-managing individual with the ability to work effectively across organizational boundaries. You possess the skill to influence both formally and informally, and have a passion for learning and working with new technology.

Additional Desired Skills:

• Experience designing, implementing and maintaining a Kubernetes ServishMesh such as LinkerD or Istio

• Experience managing logging solutions

• Experience of credential and certificate management

• Knowledge of REST API and web applications. Able to make changes to code of moderate to complex applications in one of the following languages/frameworks: Java (Spring Boot), Go, NodeJS

• Experience using cloud monitoring solutions (e.g. Datadog)

• Experience with GitOps and Flux

• Experience with Systems, Application and Network performance/availability monitoring and analysis using tools such as tcpdump and wireshark

• Clear evidence of troubleshooting and resolving issues in an application or PaaS environment

• Strong experience of service restoration activities covering web front end, Systems, Databases and Networks (at least one of these areas is required) 

#LI-CJ1

Skills

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud Operations, Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure

Compensation

Compensation offered for this role is $112,000.00 - 196,750.00 annually and is based on experience and qualifications.

The candidate(s) offered this position will be required to submit to a background investigation.

Joining our team isn’t just a job — it’s an opportunity. One that takes your skills and pushes them to the next level. One that encourages you to challenge the status quo. And one where you can impact the future for the greater good.  

You’ll do all this in a flexible environment that embraces connection and belonging. And with the recognition of several inclusivity and diversity awards, we’ve proven that Allstate empowers everyone to lead, drive change and give back where they work and live. 

Good Hands. Greater Together.

Allstate generally does not sponsor individuals for employment-based visas for this position.

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