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Senior Architect - SRE

Job Description

The Core Engineering Senior Architect - SRE role aims to leverage infrastructure, devOps and engineering experience in pursuit of helping to drive and fulfill a backlog of improvement and expansion projects for the TCS Core Platform as well as substantially contribute to the efficacy of its support. This role will utilize expert knowledge across technology to help bridge Core development and Systems Infrastructure domains, providing recommendations for design and architecture that improve the platform overall and promote a strengthening of site reliability engineering concepts and frameworks.

The Senior Architect will engage with project-based enhancements to the core platform and integrate with the Core Engineering team to provide direction on the maintenance, upgrades and management of the core platform.

The Senior Architect role will take responsibility for Incident Management related to the TCS Core Platform in North America and the UK and be a primary point of communication for Creative and Production leadership on the health and stability of the platform.

Qualifications

• Own the communication around Core stability for North America and the UK and contribute help lead the global discussion
• Gain an understanding of the platform’s production environment and the dependency tree for services
• Investigate client interactions and build client integration documentation
• Gain an understanding of the design of the platform’s infrastructure
• Gain an understanding of the platform’s observability features and service level objectives
• Review monitoring and alerting systems for real-time visibility into issues
• Review logging and metrics aggregation
• Manage application access control and cluster access
• Gain an understanding of the application release processes
• Manage and maintain application remediation automations, infrastructure automations and CI/CD pipelines
• Work with technology infrastructure to provide hardware and network recommendations to support teams
• Explore future hosting possibilities including cloud based approaches and hyperconverged platforms
• Help extend support capabilities to stakeholders
• Contribute to maintaining an authoritative source of documentation.
• Coordinate with leadership across the business and within technology to define and prioritize projects
• Mentor and pair with others in the team to encourage the professional and technical growth of others.

Objectives of the Role:

• Elevate communication and understanding between business leadership and technology
• Circulate working knowledge of pipeline-critical software and infrastructure
• Increase visibility of dependencies and requirements
• Normalize ‘outside contributions’ from non-software contributors
• Improve reliability of core services
• Improve stability of core platform
• Improve business confidence in core services / core platform / core engineering
• Institute a DevOps / SRE mindset to support, maintenance and upgrades
• Collaborate across reporting lines and departments and create transparency for Production
• Provide efficiency where possible and increase visibility of core services / core platform / core engineering around the organization
• Provide systems confidence via automated issue resolution and runbooks

Tools:

• Configuration management
• CI/CD
• Containers / container orchestration tools
• Version control systems issue tracking / jira software development workflows
• Infrastructure as code
• Monitoring, alerting, preventative automated responses
• Traffic management and observability schemes
• Intelligent scaling options
• Application lifecycle managers

About You

To succeed in the role, the following experience and competencies are viewed as important;

• Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, design and implementation
• Knowledge of the various components used to develop micro-service frameworks (such as uWSGI, NGINX, RabbitMQ and Flask).
• Expertise in k8/Kubernetes and Docker.
• Experience in deploying & managing infrastructure in the Cloud-primarily Google, Azure and AWS.
• Experience in Terraform.
• Experience using Python for service backends or development infrastructure.
• An awareness of concurrency as it applied to CPython, and writing code that scales gracefully.
• Experience administering and gaining insight from monitoring tools (such as Prometheus, Alert Manager, Grafana and Graylog).
• A working understanding of HTTP and JSON.

• Familiarity with source control, in particular Git, and associated best practices.
• Comfortable working in a primarily Linux based development and runtime environment.
• Solid knowledge of testing principles, in particular TDD and/or BDD.
• Proven problem-solving skills around technical, product and business requests.
• Be able to consider a technical solution from different perspectives, including algorithms, complexity, correctness, maintainability.
• Collaborative and team-oriented approach to product development, working with teams across locations, timezones and cultures.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Be self-motivated and demonstrate strong organizational skills.

Previous experience in the VFX industry is not required to be successful in this role.

Nice to Have

The following are not essential to be successful in the role, however prior experience or the desire to grow in these areas will be of benefit;

• SQL and general database knowledge for query writing and optimisation.
• Familiarity with web frameworks and/or full-stack development.

• Cross-platform development on Windows and OS X.
• Knowledge of Python packages and frameworks such as Flask, PyQt, PyMySQL, etc.
• An interest in the architectural perspective - contributing to architectural decisions and other technical documentation.
• Experience of Agile and lean methodologies, and an interest in process improvement in these areas.
• Experience working with large, legacy code bases; from maintenance and refactoring through to end-of-life support.

Additional Information

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If you require assistance applying, please reach out to tcstalent@technicolor.com and we'll be happy to assist.

TECHNICOLOR IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER
Technicolor complies and prohibits against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, medical condition (including genetic characteristics), mental and/or physical disability or handicap, marital status, sex, age, veteran status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, political party preference, political belief, socioeconomic status, familial status, registered domestic partner status, military service, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions and any other characteristic or activity protected by federal, state/provincial or local law.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines

Company Description

MPC’s status as a world-class VFX facility has been achieved through the development of industry-leading software which empowers our artists to create stunning imagery. We have curated a considerable portfolio of off-the-shelf and in-house software to meet these unique requirements, and continue to evolve and improve our technology as new needs emerge. The Core Engineering team operates within a larger R&D division to provide the business critical infrastructure that enables multiple projects with thousands of shots to be simultaneously completed across the globe efficiently and to the highest quality.

A blend of globally distributed software, systems and operations experts, ‘Core’ is responsible for building and maintaining key infrastructure and services in collaboration with site-local engineering teams and other specialized development teams. With users in all areas of the company, our solution (the Core Platform) is based on a distributed micro-services environment providing capabilities in areas such as compute, storage, sync, and digital asset management. Development and operational support spans the stack from operating system through to desktop/web application front-ends.

In recognition of the flexibility, scalability and maturity of the Core Platform that has been created by the team for MPC, we have been tasked with establishing the TCS Core Platform elsewhere, making it available to other business units that are part of Technicolor’s portfolio. It has been deployed to Mill Advertising in 2022 and will be underpinning Mikros Animation by the end of 2023.