Systems Engineer, Products and Platforms

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Department:

Products & Platforms

Time Type:

Full time

Work Modality:

Hybrid 01 (On Campus 3-4 Days/Week)

Union:

Job Description:

About the Department/Unit:

WAMU 88.5 is the leading public radio station in the greater Washington, D.C. area. We provide in-depth and enterprise reporting alongside essential daily news and information that aims to reflect and serve the diverse communities of our region. We believe in news as a public service and put our current and future audience at the center of our work.

Summary:

This position is responsible for designing, managing, and monitoring the technical infrastructure and performance of the systems that power WAMU's digital products and platforms. This role will perform web and app infrastructure and content management systems tasks, and is responsible for configuring vendor integrations including but not limited to podcasting, advertising, and fundraising systems that are built on WordPress, Amazon Web Services, AdsWizz, NPR, and many other integrated systems. This incumbent is accountable for service reliability and application performance as key performance indicators for success in providing consistent service to internal partners and external stakeholders such as listeners, donors and station affiliates.

Essential Functions:

• Systems administration: Management, maintenance, monitoring of an array of web, audio, and internal platforms. This role acts as the chief user of digital platforms, maintaining expertise on the most productive, secure, and sustainable ways to leverage our digital publishing, planning, and fundraising tools to maximum effect. Day-to-day responsibilities includes administrating web, podcasting, and audio streaming services, managing, and validating backups, testing and patching for security, optimizing caching layers and database performance, migrating and converting data, and configuring DNS. Escalate time sensitive and business impact issues to support business continuity and service.

• Collaboration & Communication: Collaborate with digital media stakeholders such as journalists, producers, fundraisers, and Advertising teams to deeply understand system operation workflows and expectations. Monitor and read systems release notes, test, and respond with direct actions, training, and communications to impacted users as necessary. Regularly review messages from various systems to promptly respond to emerging and changing needs. Act as system expert and respond to end user requests for help and support.

• Systems Design: Architect creative and reliable solutions to business needs by improving existing services and systems integrations and developing new ones. Use cloud platforms (including "serverless" cloud functions / lambdas) to engineer the technology infrastructure required by digital product goals. Use expertise to design and configuration AWS or Google systems, develop APIs, scripting of service functions, testing, and implementation to resolve issues or enhance performance.

• Other: Technical support as required. Expected duties include creating and improving logging, metrics, and telemetry systems for product improvement, creating reports, documenting work, estimating, and coordinating system billing, and optimizing the software development experience with tooling and automation.

Competencies:

• Acquiring and Analyzing Information

• Evaluating and Implementing Ideas

• Displaying Creativity  

• Developing Plans

• Making Accurate Judgments and Decisions

• Acting Strategically

• Driving Continuous Improvement

• Managing Perf