Senior Technical Program Manager, Production Tech - Irvine, California

Team Name:

Job Title:

Senior Technical Program Manager, Production Tech - Irvine, California

Requisition ID:

R026356

Job Description:

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)
• Prox