Platform Engineer
Universal City, CA

Job Description

Responsibilities

At Universal Studios Hollywood (USH), our purpose is to create and deliver content so compelling it entertains, informs, and shapes the world. The Platform Engineer is a member of the USH IT Infrastructure Application Platform team that represents the larger global standards under the Universal Parks and Technology umbrella. As the SME, the ideal candidate will be responsible for building and managing relationships with business and IT leaders and staff to help guide and influence the strategic positioning of systems engineering technologies and ensure alignment with business and UPT priorities. Under the direction of the Director of IT Infrastructure, the Platform Engineer will be responsible for overseeing the successful design, delivery, and administration of all aspects of the application infrastructure with a goal towards being highly-available, scalable, and performance optimized. This position is located in Universal City, CA.

Responsibilities:

* Responsible for ensuring availability and performance of the application and operations stack.
* Installation, creation and management of infrastructure components including compute, storage, and intermediate services (e.g., APIs, web presentation, DNS, CDN, etc.).
* Configuring, managing and troubleshooting microservice and API interfaces.
* Deploy and configure highly testable and rock-solid service implementations.
* Continuously managing and optimizing the performance, effectiveness, and uptime of backend services.
* Deploying, configuring, managing, patching, troubleshooting and optimizing all aspects of the infrastructure services stack.
* Participate in the upgrade, new deployment, or migration of existing application sets within existing or new environments, including Development, QA, Staging, and Production, with minimal user impact.
* Research, prototype, and implement solutions to demands relating to big data, scale, and automation.
* Responsible for coordinating projects as a technical lead and implementation standards to team members.
* Provides feedback and technical guidance to project managers on data issues of critical importance to achieving business objectives.
* Participate in the development of, and adherence to corporate IT infrastructural standards and best practices.
* Participate in systems design review sessions.
* Participate in the design, implementation and testing of enterprise wide backup/recovery and disaster recovery.
* Assist in the mentoring and coaching of other associates.
* Comfortable with following global standard procedures for build, and communicating with network, server, and storage team engineers to troubleshoot any issues.
* Creating automation tasks, deployments, and patching.
* On call support as needed and pre-determined.
* Perform other duties as assigned.

Qualifications/Requirements

* Bachelor's degree from a four-year college or university in related field or equivalent work experience required
* 3-5 years' of backend experience on a strong engineering team in installing, configuring, tuning and managing various compute environments.
* 3-5 years' experience with modern web services architectures, e.g., CDN, IIS/Apache, LBs, etc.
* Intimate familiarity and exposure to PCI/PII build and operational experience required.
* Strong experience of deployment/hosting architectures including virtualized systems, application containers, and cloud-based solutions.
* Working and administering of Windows PowerShell and shell scripting environments.
* Experience in a heterogeneous environment (e.g., Windows, Linux, .Net, etc.) and demonstrated ability to pick and justify the right technology to meet business needs.
* Experience performing needs assessment, systems planning, design, application testing and integration, production cutover, change management and 24x7 support as needed.
* Strong analytical, problem solving and planning skills.
* Experience with configuration management tools such as System Center, Ansible, Chef, Puppet.
* 2-3 years API experience, e.g., REST/JSON, SOAP/XML.
* Knowledge of operating inter-relationships between database, business applications and operating systems.
* Strong analytical and problem solving skills with high attention to detail.
* Excellent oral and written communication skills and experience in presenting to the business and technical teams, including executive management.

Desired Characteristics

* Strong experience with CDN (Akamai) and edge caching strong plus.
* Development and/or scripting language experience (e.g., PowerShell, .Net, java, Python, Ruby, etc.) is a plus.
* Experience with automation and orchestration platforms, e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, etc., is a strong plus.
* Experience with various cloud platforms, e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP and AWS is a strong plus.
* 2-3 years of working in an agile or DevOps-oriented team is desired.
* Third Party vendor management experience is a plus.
* Experience with tuning of monitoring tools such as Solarwinds is a plus.
* Experience with containerization technologies and methodologies is a plus.