Consulting/Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Location: Open to applicants working from the East Coast of the United States of America

Who we  are  

    Elsevier helps researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society.      

We have a fantastic opportunity for a Principal Engineer to join our growing team of Infrastructure Platform engineers in operating our platform services.  

    Elsevier’s culture of putting ourselves in our customers shoes is key to our success. We bring together people with a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. We encourage people to collaborate, act fast and pivot if wrong in a blame-free environment. We hold ourselves accountable to deliver the right outcomes and strive to create an environment that provides the support needed to learn and grow.   

What you’ll do  

At Elsevier we’re converging towards an Infrastructure Platform that can be used by teams across the organisation. The operations squad is part of a wider Infrastructure Platform team that is collectively responsible for building, maintaining, and supporting platform services. This is a highly collaborative environment with zero barriers between different focus areas. Our approach is to capitalise on the aspirations, experience, and skills of the wider team to solve specific challenges, regardless of the role’s primary focus. This can take place in different forms, for example, we’ve formed a working group to bring together the right skills, interests, and experience to address the project’s CI/CD challenges.  

You will combine software thinking and service operations to enable and run Elsevier’s large-scale, 24x7, distributed and fault-tolerant systems within agreed reliability objectives, whilst enabling the fast flow of feature and service updates. We also have a goal to adopt SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) practices to drive availability, and reliability of our products, and you will be key to the adoption of this strategy over the next few years. You will also play a key part in the planning and definition of future central initiatives. 

Initially the role will focus on three key objectives: build and support platform infrastructure and supporting services, definition and setup of an internal Platform-as-a-Service operations support model, and on-boarding products onto the Platform. Our goal is to have 80% of Elsevier’s workloads on the Platform by 2025. 

   Our internal customers span Product, Development and Engineering teams across Elsevier, whether they are building or supporting clients, backend services, libraries, data pipelines or machine learning models. The Infrastructure Platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support arranged as an internal product. Autonomous delivery teams can make use of the Platform to deliver quality software to customers easily, at a higher pace, without the need for specialist infrastructure knowledge.  

Who you  are 

The ideal candidate will have a demonstrable proficiency in all aspects of the DevOps culture, working flexibly and collaboratively within Technology and across an enterprise organization; ideally possessing direct experience as a software engineer before transitioning into infrastructure support and build engineering. They would also: 

• Have a passion for well-thought-out and straightforward solutions to problems. 

• Lead by example, work collaboratively, and establish credibility with the quality of your technical execution. 

• Want to be a key player in our open, engaging, collaborative Agile team. 

• Support and nurture junior team members 

• Understand SRE practices, and disciplines, be able to articulate how these would be implemented for controlled services. 

• Appreciate the importance of observability and using related data to tell a story. 

• Able to formulate and execute solutions to take into consideration the needs of multiple stakeholders 

• Be able to provide and optimise an operating environment that results in clarity, engaged teams and fast flow of change.   

• Have experience in providing 24x7 operational support. 

• Provide out of hours support through participation in an on-call rota. 

Skills and Experience Needed for  

• A get-stuff-done attitude, have great positive energy and can make an impact through technical execution.  

• Strong problem-solving skills, and the ability to collaborate with other teams for resolving incidents. 

• Support complex application stacks in a cloud setting. Ensure applications are highly available and secure. 

• Strong understanding of how monitoring tools and observability can help with determining the root cause of customer impacting performance issues. 

• Experience of presenting varying types of data to varying levels of audiences. 

• Experience in building automation to scale infrastructure and supporting services. 

• Experience supporting infrastructure and services in public cloud environments (AWS, Azure).  

• Strong understanding of modern scripting languages 

• Strong understanding of Security best practices. Have a security first approach to execution. 

Work in a way that works for you 

We promote a healthy work-life balance across the organisation. With an average length of service of 9 years, we are confident that we offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long-term goals. 

·        Working flexible hours - flexing the times you work in the day 

·        Working 4 days a week or working a shorter day - please talk to your recruiter about your desired flexible working options

About Us 

Supporting the work of research and health partners, we are a global leader in information and analytics. From visionary health education and peer-reviewed literature through to interactive learning technology, our work ultimately improves the health outcomes of society. Constantly striving to spark the next great discovery in science or healthcare, our technology allows big ideas to change the world. 

Join Us 

Are you ready to help us progress science? Our technology leads to innovation, so join a forward-thinking digital business that is tackling world-scale challenges and align your ambitions with our passion for driving global knowledge-sharing. 

What we offer 

Healthy work-life balance: 

• 25 days paid holiday (not counting public holidays) with the option to buy additional days 

• Competitive Salary Package plus benefits 

• Access to a competitive contributory pension scheme and life assurance 

• Health screening and private medical benefits 

• Season ticket loan 

• Flexible working hours 

• Remote working (currently full-time, and will be reviewed once the pandemic is over) 

• Shared parental leave 

• Study leave 

• Sabbaticals 

We are an equal opportunity employer: qualified applicants are considered for and treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, disability status, protected veteran status, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. If a qualified individual with a disability or disabled veteran needs a reasonable accommodation to use or access our online system, that individual should please contact accommodations@relx.com or if you are based in the US you may also contact us on  1.855.833.5120. 

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Elsevier is an equal opportunity employer: qualified applicants are considered for and treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, disability status, protected veteran status, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law. We are committed to providing a fair and accessible hiring process. If you have a disability or other need that requires accommodation or adjustment, please let us know by completing our Applicant Request Support Form: https://forms.office.com/r/eVgFxjLmAK , or please contact 1-855-833-5120.

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