Operations Engineer (140-011)

Advertising.com is the most innovative company in online advertising, with pioneering technologies and strategies that have made us one of most successful dots in the dot.com world. We conduct strategic marketing campaigns that guarantee results for our clients. And for employees, we offer a one-of-a-kind place to begin or advance your career. We’re the best in our business because we attract the best people. So we hope you'll take a minute to see what the dot is all about.
Job Description:
As a member of Technology Operations, the Operations Engineer's responsibilities extend across two major functional areas - the operational health of application systems in a 24x7x365 Internet production environment and the integration of changes to component applications produced by development teams. The Operations Engineer performs the duties associated with these responsibilities by maintaining excellent relationships with technology and business stakeholders.

The primary environment is often referred to as an, "ecosystem", consisting of mostly proprietary applications hosted among a fleet of Linux and MS Windows systems. There is a high degree of interdependency between various platforms within the production fleet.

The chosen individual will provide support at the company's Baltimore, MD headquarters, and may make occasional trips to the remote datacenter in Sterling, VA.
Duties and Responsibilities:
• Monitor and maintain 24 hour technical operation of platforms in a production environment including:
• Acting on automated alerts
• Responding to reported product failures
• Log file analysis/archiving/cleanup
• Application failovers
• QA, beta, and production deployments and monitoring
• Develop and implement solutions for fault, performance, capacity, and configuration management for applications. Will leverage scripting capabilities to automate platform monitoring and maintenance solutions.
• Identifies production stability concerns via break point and impact analysis. Designs, develops and implements remediation plans to address.
• Provide Tier 2 support to issues escalated from Technical Support team. Interface with development teams to resolve Tier 3 ‘in code’ issues. On-call support for escalated off-hours issues.
• May design, develop, and implement documentation or tools to facilitate Technical Support team responsibilities. Mentors Technical Support on an as needed basis.
• May provide Tier 1 & 2 support for new applications.
• Act as Technology Operations representative within Advertising.com’s SDLC, speaking to operational requirements, design considerations, and production impacts for new development efforts. In turn, the Operations Engineer owns various tasks within the SDLC, along with the final application products of these efforts and their integration into production. Tasks include:
• Design input and review
• Impact Analysis
• Monitoring, capacity modeling
• Operational documentation
• SLA implementation for resulting products
• Maintain a high degree of involvement with Infrastructure teams regarding application needs or repercussions of infrastructure changes.
• Maintenance of internal SLAs developed with business stakeholders.
• Perform other activities and duties as requested.
REQUIREMENTS


Required Skills and Abilities:
• Intermediate shell scripting experience (Unix).
• Strong knowledge of and experience with various Internet Technologies (TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, JavaScript).
• Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL.
• Excellent deductive reasoning and troubleshooting skills.
• Excellent organizational and interpersonal skills.
• Ability to communicate effectively with people of various technical skill levels including other engineering groups, Technical Support, Business Operations, Sales, and external clients.
• Ability to maintain own workflow, effectively prioritizing to best meet departmental or organizational goals.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced and dynamic environment.
• Team player.
• Self motivated with a strong desire to grow technical skills across a broad range of technologies as well as learn about Advertising.com’s Business Operations.
• Ability to understand and deconstruct program flow, and be conversant with developers on design and implementation options. Familiar with source management tools such as CVS and/or Subversion.
• Ability to meet attendance standards and provide off-hours operational support.
• Strong communication (both verbal and written) and customer service skills in a clear and concise manner.
• Ability to mentor a plus.
• Perl scripting experience a definite plus.
• Object Orienting Programming experience a plus.
• Unix administrative skills a plus.
• Experience in a large, multi-tiered production environments a plus
Education and/or Experience:
• Bachelor’s degree in a Technical, Scientific, or Engineering discipline or equivalent work experience.
• 0-2 years experience in a technical role (support/operations, development, systems administration)
• Any similar combination of education or experience