Staff Site Reliability Engineer

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
 

Pay Range: $140,200.00 - $217,200.00

Job Description

Essential Functions and Responsibilities:

• Identify and reduce redundant, unnecessary processes by asking the question, “Is this process improving our ability to reliably deliver software to our customers?”
• Help resolve bugs causing consistent reliability issues by working to identify the root cause and proposing short-term and long-term solutions to triage and resolve them.
• Advocate for reliable design patterns in our distributed systems (graceful failure in the event of absent dependencies, share-nothing architecture, loose coupling of services, etc.) and work to get reliability features prioritized in team backlogs.
• Identify reliability concerns before they become an outage via engagements with teams regarding major code revisions.
• Collaborate with developers, designers, testing, and product management to address issues with service reliability or performance.
• Work with Product to create and update KPIs for their products to allow business process level observability of throughput.
• Work with product teams to set SLO, SLI, and error budgets for their services.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and respond to major incidents.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Knowledge, Skill and Abilities:

• Demonstrated ability to work with monitoring and alerting platforms; New Relic and Opsgenie.
• Practical knowledge of CI/CD technologies; Github, CodePipeline.
• Practical knowledge of programming languages; Python and Java.
• Practical knowledge of databases; Oracle, Postgres, DynamoDB.
• Demonstrated ability with chaos engineering technologies.
• Demonstrated ability to perform technical analysis in a discovery fashion, resulting in architecture artifacts such as a logical system deployment diagram, sequence diagram, state diagram, ERD, etc. This must be performed in UML.
• Practical knowledge of design patterns, the conditions that indicate their usage and an ability to identify anti-patterns when presented a diagram that contains the relevant information.
• Practical knowledge of various application architectures; must be well familiar with Martin Fowler’s Enterprise Application Design Patterns.
• Can execute through soft skills as this position is one of leadership but has no direct reports.

Competencies: 

Organizational or Student Impact:

• Recommends and implements changes in technical/business processes; identifies areas for improvement.
• Helps lead/coordinate extremely complex technical projects and programs and leads development and implementation of innovative solutions for specialized technical issues.
• Works proactively; identifies and helps prevent/ solve problems that may cross disciplines.
• Fully understands and quantifies project risks with impact. Identifies, generates, and implements innovative solutions.

Problem Solving & Decision Making:

• This individual accomplishes goals and objectives independently.
• Builds and leads teams, influencing decisions and results.
• Uses discretion to fully scope, design, and implement solutions to complex technical problems.
• The individual provides regular technical advice and direction to technical teams and management.
• Models and helps set high standards for effective interactions with internal and external individuals.

Communication & Influence:

• Communicates with parties within and outside of their job function and typically has responsibilities for communicating with parties external to the organization.
• Works to influence others to accept and understand new concepts, practices, and approaches. Requires ability to communicate with executive leadership regarding matters of significant importance to the organization.
• This individual may conduct briefings with senior leaders within the technical function.

Leadership:

• Frequently responsible for providing guidance, coaching, and training to other employees across the Company within the area of expertise.
• Responsible for managing large, complex project initiatives or strategically important solutions to the organization, involving large cross-functional teams.
• May have direct reports but generally fewer than three.

Job Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

• The individual is acknowledged within the group as a subject matter expert.
• Typically requires a University Degree or equivalent experience.
• 9 years of prior relevant experience.

Department Specific Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field. Appropriate prior experience and depth may be substituted for this qualification.
• 9 years experience in site reliability engineering, systems administration, or software development; automating approaches and technologies in engineering
• Experience in web-based applications and integrations to enable those application using Java, Python, REST, JSON/YAML, XML, SQL and other technologies, including experience integrating third-party products
• Experience in monitoring and alerting platforms, especially New Relic and Opsgenie.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Technical Experience in any of the following:
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS), Jira, Agile/Scrum, Python, OAuth 2, IDM/OSSO, Ruby/Rails, PHP, Hibernate/Seam, J2EE, Tomcat, jQuery, JavaScript, NOSQL, Angular, New Relic, Opsgenie.
• Technical Certifications

• Strong experience with distance education and distance learning students is preferred.

Physical Requirements:

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
• Must be able to lift up to 15 pounds at times.

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Position & Application Details

Full-Time Regular Positions (classified as regular and working 40 standard weekly hours): This is a full-time, regular position (classified for 40 standard weekly hours) that is eligible for bonuses; medical, dental, vision, telehealth and mental healthcare; health savings account and flexible spending account; basic and voluntary life insurance; disability coverage; accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity supplemental coverages; legal and identity theft coverage; retirement savings plan; wellbeing program; discounted WGU tuition; and flexible paid time off for rest and relaxation with no need for accrual, flexible paid sick time with no need for accrual, 11 paid holidays, and other paid leaves, including up to 12 weeks of parental leave.

How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.

Additional Information

Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It’s not all-inclusive.

Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at recruiting@wgu.edu.

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.