The Sr. Systems Engineer, (SSE) ensures the stability, integrity, and efficient operation of information systems and technologies that support core customer facing and enterprise facing products and platforms. This role serves as a subject matter expert in a complex array of full stack solutions. This role will perform research, analysis, design, creation, and implementation of systems to meet current and future requirements. The role is a discipline which combines both software and systems engineering to build and operate large-scale, distributed, fault-tolerant systems. The role will be immersed in the elements of development, integration, operation, and support for platform services. S/he will work with engineering, application and enterprise/solution architects to develop and implement services, monitor, report and tune infrastructure platforms. The role will develop full stack automation, infrastructure as code across Marriott public cloud platforms.

The Public Cloud product produces services including Compute/Storage, Virtualization, Operating Systems, Container Platforms, Middleware, Database, Business Intelligence, Tools and Automation through “Infrastructure As Code” across Marriott’s entire Public Cloud footprint.

CANDIDATE PROFILE

Education and Experience

Required:

• Undergraduate degree in an engineering or computer science discipline and/or equivalent experience/certification
• 7+ years experience in information technology with the following:
  • Linux experience
  • Cloud technologies including Iaas/Paas/Saas deployments on Public Cloud and Cloud native services
  • OS scripting and automation
• 5+ years professional experience in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) modeling including infrastructure as code development (Terraform or similar) or infrastructure engineering at enterprise scale
• 5+ years professional experience in automated configuration management (Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
• 5+ years professional experience with cloud computing technology and its concepts (AWS, Azure, AliCloud, GCP) and/or virtualized (VMWare, OpenStack)
• 5+ years professional experience in container operations (Docker, OpenShift Enterprise, GKE, EKS)
  • Orchestration (Docker, Racher, Kubernetes)
• Experience operating in an agile scrum environment.
• Delivery focused with experience to deliver incrementally at a fast pace in 2-week sprints

Additional Preferred Experiences:

• Experience with Security Protocols (SSL, SAML, SAMP, LDAP etc.) and controls (container scanning, log aggregation, network scanning, CVE)
• Experience in one or more of the following: C, C++, Java, Python, Go, Perl, or Ruby
• Experience in designing, analyzing, and engineering large-scale distributed systems
• Experience in the design, implementation and operational support of mission critical solutions
• Demonstrated experience delivering technology solutions in a fast-paced, deadline driven enterprise environment
• Demonstrated experience learning and applying new technologies to solve business needs
• Excellent problem-solving skills working independently and through leading outcomes for cross functional teams
• Excellent understanding of change management, testing requirements, techniques, and tools to ensure high availability of systems
• Strong attention to detail with an ability to operate effectively across multiple priorities
• Experience across many of the following platforms:
  • Container platforms (Examples: OpenShift, Docker, Kubernetes, GKE)
  • Operating Systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, Windows, CentOS
  • Storage: Block Storage, Object Storage, Lifecycle Management and Data Replication, Backup & Recovery Best Practices
  • Network Virtualization: Akamai Global Traffic Management and Edge & Delivery Networks, Elastic Load Balancing Services, Domain Name Services and Registration
  • Security: Compliance, Information Assurance, Data Protection using industry-best practices and tooling (Crowdstrike Falcon, Tenable.io, Splunk Phantom, HashiCorp Vault signers, SHA1 and SHA2 certificate management)
  • Applications Frameworks: Java Spring, Java Play, node.js, NginX, JavaEE, HTML5
  • Database: Relational (Oracle, DB2, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MSSQL Server), non-relational (Cassandra, Couchbase, MongoDB, CockroachDB)
• Requirement gathering, validation, fulfillment and change management
• Infrastructure operations experience including self-healing autonomy
• Provide functional, technical, and/or process leadership, or Project Management experience
• Strong knowledge of emerging tools, software, applications, and systems for attaining best-in-class IT technology across the enterprise
• Experience in researching emerging technologies and trends, standards, and products
• Experience in developing technology roadmaps and strategies
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for a wide range of audiences including executives, business stakeholders and IT teams
• Understanding of automated ITCM/ITRM best practices
• Experience operating in Scaled Agile Framework

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES

• Provides technical leadership, oversight, governance and direction for services related to Marriott solution delivery
• Provides technical expertise to project team for successful project and change implementations
• Determines customer requirements and works with sourced resources to develop solutions
• Leads analysis of current environment for deficiencies and provides solutions
• Provides input into lifecycle, improvement, and standardization strategies
• Develops and generates periodic utilization reports to provide visibility to performance, capacity, availability and SLA management
• Utilize capacity data to model future state planning with overall strategy and goals
• Provides and presents status, analysis and reporting to internal stakeholders, Executive Management and Senior Leadership
• Trains and/or mentors other team members, and peers as appropriate
• Identifies opportunities to enhance the service delivery, operations and continual service improvement processes
• Develop implementation plans, test plans, and timelines for projects and tasks
• Responsible for project inception including requirements gathering and architecting, costs and chargeback modeling, infrastructure-as- code development and configuration management
• Work with Enterprise Architecture to provide technology and cloud native service governance for technology steering committees, with cost and support directives
• Promote Marriott International Cloud Platform capabilities including Cloud Native Services for cost effective solutions against architecture
• Promote Containers-as-a-Service Kubernetes methodologies for orchestrated scheduling of portable containers across global cloud platforms
• Monitor and drive industry best practice Continuous Delivery principals for improvement of application and feature deployment velocity with minimal downtime
• Work with MI Security for governance and application of Tier0/1 Security tooling across the entire fleet of cloud virtual machines including automated OS, access, log, DDOS and code monitoring and auditing
• Own relationships with tooling and Cloud vendors including Red Hat, Docker, Chef, Amazon, Google
• Coordination between onshore/offshore engineering and operations teams; handover and acceptance of L1/2 shared services Ops

Delivering Technology

• Create and enhance administrative, operational and technical policies and procedures, adopting best practice guidelines, standards and procedures for employees, contractors and vendor engagements
• Maintains a proper balance between business and operational risk
• Management of daily infrastructure operations to ensure availability SLA is met for storage services
• Interfaces with stakeholders to establish requirements and formulate priorities for infrastructure projects
• Leads/assists in configuration management
• Works in a concerted effort with application development and engineering teams to resolve complex issues
• Provides oversight, collaboration, provisioning, management and maintenance of technology products and service alternatives that improve the production services environment
• Responsible for the establishment and continuous development of monitoring and alerting for all production environments
• Develops internal processes and training to ensure team members have the needed skills and tools to support the production environments and deliver on project commitments
• Performs complex quantitative and qualitative analyses for operational availability to promote a zero-defect environment
• Facilitates achievement of expected deliverables and obligations of Services Providers
• Leads/assists operational teams in system updates & upgrades
• Provides consultation for routine and complex systems development
• Ensures early warning to the business stakeholder executives regarding degraded or missed service levels
• Coordinates with Plan and Build teams for deployment and production support activities

IT Governance

• Follows all defined IT standards and processes (i.e. IT Governance, SM&G, Architecture, etc.), and provides input for improvements to the appropriate process owners as needed
• Execute infrastructure compliance monitors and auditing to ensure user and password security
• Maintains a proper balance between business and operational risk
• Follows the defined project management standards and processes

Service Provider Management

• Ensures proper coordination with appropriate IT and vendor relations teams
• Manages Service Providers with a focus on continuous service improvement and service evolution
• Monitors, manages and leads Service Provider outcomes required to ensure operational availability and a zero-defect production environment
• Consults with internal Service Management & external Service Providers on performance, business reporting, analytics metrics and business value dashboards