Lead DevOps Engineer (P474)

84.51° Overview:

84.51° is a retail data science, insights and media company. We help The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase.

Powered by cutting-edge science, we utilize first-party retail data from more than 62 million U.S. households sourced through the Kroger Plus loyalty card program to fuel a more customer-centric journey using 84.51° Insights, 84.51° Loyalty Marketing and our retail media advertising solution, Kroger Precision Marketing.

Join us at 84.51°!

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The Lead DevOps Engineer (Observability and Hosting) will operate as the day-to-day technical lead within one of our DevOps teams. This will include 50% hands on implementation, 25% product / project management, and 25% architecture design. You will be working with team members to accomplish our goals, triage support requests, and participate in an on-call schedule. As a group, we are responsible for the application hosting platforms (Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Azure Kubernetes Service) and the entire end-to-end observability stack (logging, monitoring/alerting, tracing from front-end through backend and database technologies). Our team’s purpose is to provide well integrated, low friction solutions for normal use-cases and empower high tech teams with the self-service options to solve complex problems.
  

RESPONSIBILITIES:  

• Work with engineering leadership to develop and execute annual and quarterly goals for improving our technology platform offerings and support for migrating between platforms 

• Manage day-to-day team work / meetings, cooperating with product owner to execute on goals/OKRs 

• Provide problem resolution for referred incidents from the Service Desk and other technology teams via Teams support channels / escalation 

• Leverage internal processes for change management to enable teams to plan for upgrades / outages 

• Collaborate within and across the DevOps teams to ensure all platform documentation is maintained as functionality changes across our teams 

• Collaborate with Engineering teams to ensure infrastructure is meeting the business needs of the organization (understanding needs and incorporating feedback from customers appropriately to scale our team/processes across the org) 

• Responsible for 2-3 technologies including complete ownership of all aspects of the technology (maintain, upgrade, train, mentor).  

  

QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS, AND EXPERIENCE:  

• A 4-year Degree in a technology related discipline or equivalent knowledge from work experience (7-10 years in field with progressive experience in new technologies) 

• 3 or more years’ experience providing 2nd and/or 3rd line support in a fast-paced environment. 

• Ability to solve problems and prioritize against deadlines / goals across several projects - working through others and enabling team members to succeed is a key success criteria for a lead role 

• Ability to communicate our work with both technical and business audiences and link our technical work back to business value 

• Passionate about technology and embraces change – establishing patterns and implementing ideas that enable new work to succeed and teams to move faster on their core objectives 

• Ability to work in a highly collaborative environment – we frequently work directly with customers projects to identify changes that will help fix not only their problem but feed into org wide solution 

  

TECHNOLOGY SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS:  

• Direct implementation experience of Kubernetes cluster administration and operational concepts – we use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and gitops methods to control our cluster apps 

• Direct implementation experience of observability / monitoring tooling and supporting libraries – we have a mixed environment today but are moving towards Datadog as our central source (currently, Dynatrace, Grafance, and Jaegar are all in the mix) 

• Experience operating in a mixed on-premise and cloud environment – we are migrating from PCF to AKS over the next year, and have other on-prem, VM-hosted services that will need maintenance and migration to cloud 

• Familiarity with CI/CD workflows and how that interacts with deploying to Kubernetes – we use Github Actions and Harness with Helm today 

• Familiarity with networking (traffic flows, scaling, monitoring) in the context of both on-prem and cloud – we are in Azure and have a mixed environment of on-prem and cloud systems 

• Familiarity with artifact hosting/management – we use Jfrog Artifactory today, but general experience with managing and deploying these systems is largely transferable 

• Experience identifying and managing cloud hosted services (e.g. databases), identifying self-hosting vs hosted opportunities 

• Experience with contract negotiation preferred, but not required (helping with vendors, contracts, and considering alternatives will be a part of this role) 

 

 

IMPORTANT INFO

This is a Hybrid position. Candidates must be able to come into the office on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of each week. We have locations in Cincinnati, OH, Chicago, IL, Deerfield, IL, New York, NY, and Portland, OR. There are no remote options for this position. 

We are NOT working with Staffing Firms, Consulting Companies, or any other 3rd parties on this position. 

Full-time only. No contracts. No C2C. 

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