Job Abstract

Team Name:

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 Technical Program Managers (TPMs) 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.

This role is a hybrid work position, with some work on-site and some work-from-home. The potential home studio for this role is Irvine, CA. However, we understand each person’s circumstances may be unique and will work with you to explore other possible options, including remote work arrangements.

As a TPM within the SRE org at Blizzard, you may find yourself…

• Using your strong oral and written communication skills to ensure all Blizzard product teams have a direct connection into Blizzard's centralized technology and platform departments
• Presenting novel ideas, solutions, and projects to both small and large audiences
• Using a holistic perspective when prioritizing efforts to maximize business value and satisfy team needs  
• Building and actively maintaining positive, collaborative relationships across the company
• Championing automation to reduce toil and increase development velocity
• Helping define and instrument Service-Level Objectives to ensure epic player experiences
• Hosting blameless postmortems to share learnings, discover gaps, embrace transparency, and improve reliability across our services
• Identifying and eliminating risks and blockers. Communicating project status to interested parties.
• Creating urgency and momentum for projects that may not have a firm deadline.

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
• Strive to be better, smarter, and faster tomorrow than you are today
• Enjoy trying new technologies and tools 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 SRE and 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 engineers from multiple teams to create solutions that focus on providing value to our players
• Are emotionally intelligent and self-aware in all personal interactions
• Help your peers succeed as much as you can

Types of projects you may work on…

• Managing the portfolio of work that iteratively improves 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
• Planning and coordinating service migrations from one cloud/data center to another 
• Working closely with our all teams at Blizzard to help define how future products should operate
• Driving the planning and execution of stress tests to validate scale expectations vs reality

Areas of Focus for the SRE org at Blizzard

As a TPM, you will be orchestrating projects and planning for the SREs in our department. 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)

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. 

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/.