Software Engineer Principal

The Site Reliability Engineer drives Vertex to implement highly reliable, scalable, and performant system across the enterprise.  This is realized by relentlessly measuring the environments and finding areas that need improvement.  Improvements can range from education of engineering and operational resources, creating new capabilities, providing code enhancements, or implementing processes and tools. Success is measured by data and backed by continued customer satisfaction.  The SRE Engineer will use their infrastructure experiences combined with development engineering best practices to build solutions to improve our environment.

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Responsible for designing, developing, implementing, and optimizing the efficiency of the environment including performance, reliability, and scalability of our services.
• Responsible for measuring the health and performance of the environments by implementing tooling such as Datadog to achieve the proper level of visibility of the environment.
• Enable teams to implement observability by developing and publishing standards and best practices, and providing guidance and implementation assistance to engineering teams.
• Responsible for designing and implementing coding assignments related to applications, systems reliability, monitoring, alerting, and analytics.
• Responsible for effectively managing Incidents to quickly and efficiently restore service to Vertex customers
• Accountable to bridge and educate Engineering and Operations teams to ensure SRE principles are implemented consistently across the enterprise.
• Take a proactive approach to anticipate and correct a wide range of production issues including outages, processing slowdowns or stoppages, errors, and failures
• Recommend engineering and operational improvements including code enhancements, process improvements, or procedural amendments.
• Ability to triage, isolate, and resolve complex environmental issues in an expedient and open fashion
• Provide technical leadership for a wide range of projects.
• Assist and mentor other engineering staff

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES:

• Experience with multiple software development languages including C#, Go, Python or Java.
• Experience with platform monitoring tools like Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, or similar
• Experience with Software as a Service (SaaS) environments including architecture and management.
• Experience designing and deploying AWS services with an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) mindset with tools like Terraform.
• Experience with multiple hyperscalers, most notably AWS, Azure, and OCI
• Experience in Agile development methodology.
• Excellent written / verbal communication skills and presentation and project management skills.
• Ability to debug complex distributed systems to understand system design with an eye for performance and scalability bottlenecks and provide recommendations to optimize code
• Exposure to container related technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, etc.
• Develop deeper insights into platform incidents and influence with engineering backlog to address repeat incidents and prevent incidents proactively
• Ability to lead the work of others in the context of a project.
• Ability to work without supervision, working with wide latitude for independent decision making.

EDUCATION, TRAINING:

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in technology related roles and 5+ years in a production engineering/DevOps/SRE or similar role working on high scale distributed systems
• Experience with AWS or another cloud PaaS provider
• Strong problem-solving, troubleshooting and analytical skills clearly demonstrated in past projects
• Ability to debug, optimize code, and automate routine tasks.

Other Qualifications – The Winning Way behaviours that all Vertex employees need in order to meet the expectations of each other, our customers, and our partners.

• Communicate with Clarity - Be clear, concise and actionable. Be relentlessly constructive. Seek and provide meaningful feedback.
• Act with Urgency - Adopt an agile mentality - frequent iterations, improved speed, resilience. 80/20 rule – better is the enemy of done. Don’t spend hours when minutes are enough.
• Work with Purpose - Exhibit a “We Can” mindset. Results outweigh effort. Everyone understands how their role contributes. Set aside personal objectives for team results.
• Drive to Decision - Cut the swirl with defined deadlines and decision points. Be clear on individual accountability and decision authority. Guided by a commitment to and accountability for customer outcomes.
• Own the Outcome - Defined milestones, commitments and intended results. Assess your work in context, if you’re unsure, ask. Demonstrate unwavering support for decisions.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by individuals in this position.  Other functions may be assigned, and management retains the right to add or change the duties at any time