Senior Systems Engineer
Chicago, IL

Job Description

Isobar is a digital agency committed to delivering robust, innovative, world-class solutions. We design and build everything from content-rich brand experiences to sophisticated business platforms to dynamic media and entertainment apps. Isobar's breadth of clientele means that our people have a broad range of industry and platform opportunities to explore. Full collaboration between our technology, user experience, creative, business, and marketing teams ensures we create complex, award-winning, slam-dunk work.

Position Overview

Isobar is seeking Senior Systems Engineers who enjoy the challenge of building automated solutions for continuous delivery of large-scale, highly available web applications. The ideal candidate must have experience working in a DevOps model playing an active role with software developers in building solutions. Past experience as a software developer is a plus, but not a core job responsibility. Instead, an understanding of software development processes, tools, and operations is the focus.

Expectations also include performance and capacity monitoring, resolving trouble tickets, collaborating with and escalating issues to third-level support (development), and managing code promotion processes between environments.

Candidates should possess effective written and verbal communication skills and be willing to travel.

Responsibilities

* Configure and manage development, QA, and staging and production environments hosted on various cloud environments (Azure, Amazon) or client hosting centers
* Design, implement, and operate systems that leverage cloud-native platforms and capabilities, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
* Manage the promotion of code between environments using current techniques and tooling for infrastructure, deployment, and test automation
* Design and implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using industry-leading infrastructure automation tooling (Ansible, Chef, CloudFormation, ARM Templates, Terraform, etc.)
* Collaborate with development teams to plan and support upcoming releases, and implement operational enhancements to improve reliability and scalability
* Anticipate operational issues before code reaches production, including advising and supporting development teams with product enhancements and design changes, as well as specifying and implementing new tools and processes prior to production launches
* Proactively monitor production system performance, uptime, and daily operations, including the configuration and use of automated, cloud-based monitoring and alerting offerings (AWS CloudWatch, Azure OMS, etc.)
* Monitor production system performance and uptime and daily operations, ranging from traditional system measures to business-specific transactional monitoring for nightly jobs and ad-hoc review of logs
* Assist in the development of capacity plans for future infrastructure needs and scale server environments to implement those plans
* Identify and implement opportunities for automating existing processes in order to streamline operations and support functions
* Manage server and application patches for routine upkeep and vulnerabilities
* Stay current of trends and innovations in the virtual hosting and management space, bringing opportunities for improvement to the technical teams and leading their implementation
* Ensure deliverables are client‐ready, high quality, and can easily be turned into templates and standards for other Isobar engagements

Required Experience / Skills

* 3 years of experience developing web applications, or designing and administering the systems that support them
* Minimum 2 years of experience managing and administering cloud hosting environments
* Minimum 2 years of experience with infrastructure automation / IaC
* Minimum 2 years of experience scripting common languages such as Bash, Python, or Ruby
* Experience with code management and promotion toolsets, including source code control and continuous integration
* Experience running Linux or Unix in real-world production environments, preferably at scale
* Experience with native-cloud application and database hosting platforms such as Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service, and Amazon RDS to include capacity planning and cost estimation
* Ability to perform problem determination and root-cause analysis to maximize availability and meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
* Knowledge of and experience with promotion strategies for applications between different development and production environments
* Experience performing needs assessments, design, application testing and integration, production cutover, change management, and capacity planning

Nice to Have

* Software development experience
* Experience using NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis, or Memcache
* Experience working with Serverless technologies (Lambda, Azure Functions, etc.)
* Experience with identity and access management and identity federation technologies and best practices (Active Directory/ADFS, SAML, etc.)
* Experience with a number of widely-available development and administrative tools, languages, databases, and frameworks such as JBoss, Tomcat, WebLogic, PingFederate, Chef, Puppet, Apache, Nginx, Ruby, Python, Git, SVN, etc.
* Experience with on-premise to cloud migrations