Level 2 Engineer

KEY ACTIVITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

As a Level 2 Engineer, you are accountable for:

Operational Support

• Lead and coordinate level 2 support operations for mission-critical applications and infrastructure
• Provide troubleshooting and diagnostics for incidents escalated from level 1
• Ensure adherence to SLA, system availability

Incident & Problem Management

• Act as incident manager for P1/P2 issues
• Coordinate resolution and communications
• Perform root cause analysis and recommend permanent fixes
• Escalate unresolved issues that required software coding to Level 3 or engineering teams

Change Management

• Perform operational impact assessment
• Part of the CAB to review and approve change
• Pre-Change Preparation such as review Change Request and Release Plan
• Supervise post-change production verification
• Documentation update and knowledge transfer
• Post change review and feedback

Patch Management

• Perform patch management readiness
• Stakeholder coordination and team coordination
• System Readiness and Post-Patch Validation
• Documentation update and knowledge transfer
• Compliance and audit readiness

Documentation and Compliance

• Operational documentation. SOPs, Incident response checklist, RCA, PIR, monitoring and alert guidebook
• Configuration & Infrastructure Documentation. System configuration baseline, application dependency maps, environment inventories such as hosts, services, accounts
• Knowledge Base Articles for level 2 enablement and faster resolution e.g. Known Errors and Fixes, Frequent How-To Guides, Script Repositories, Lessons Learned
• Knowledge Management

Configuration Management

• Perform validation and accuracy of configurations
• Maintain readiness of operational documentation
• Perform audit to confirm compliance of configurations
• CMDB asset verification
• Change-linked configuration tracking
• Ensure environment consistency between DEV – IVVQ – ISO-PROD – UAT and PROD

Testing and Verification

• Ensure operational readiness testing before production deployment rollout
• Ensure post-change verification coordination
• Perform regression and sanity test following patching or upgrades, in UAT and PROD
• Participation in user acceptance testing

Knowledge Management

• Documentation of resolution
• Knowledge Base Contribution
• Validation of knowledge
• Subject Matter Expertise Sharing

Root Cause Analysis

• Gather logs, system metrics at the time of failure
• Reproduction of issues in a controlled environment to understand the conditions under which it occurs
• Determine the scope and severity in terms of the systems affected, downtime duration and business impact
• Narrow down the possible sources of causing the failure
• Use of diagnostic tools such to analyse the application behaviour
• Correlation of events to sequence the chain of events leading up to the failure and identify the dependencies

KAST (Kubernetes Analytics Stack)

• THALES proprietary Kubernetes-based platform that provides a foundational digital infrastructure across Thales business domain

Kubernetes

• Kubernetes is an open-source platform developed by Google for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications (typically Docker containers).

Docker

• Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications using a single configuration file (docker-compose.yml). It allows you to define, manage, and run multiple interconnected Docker containers as a single service stack.

Kafka

• Apache Kafka is a high-performance distributed streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines, stream processing, and event-driven architectures.

EMQX

• EMQX is an MQTT broker that acts as a message middleware between publishers (e.g., sensors, devices) and subscribers (e.g., apps, dashboards, databases) using the MQTT protocol, which is a lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol ideal for low-bandwidth, high-latency, or constrained devices.

Elasticsearch

• Elasticsearch is a distributed, open-source search and analytics engine built on top of Apache Lucene. It is widely used for full-text search, log and event data analysis, and real-time data exploration.

MinIO

• MinIO is a high-performance, distributed object storage system that stores data as objects (like files, images, videos, backups) in buckets

Zookeeper

• Apache ZooKeeper is an open-source coordination service for distributed applications. It provides a highly reliable, consistent, and available mechanism to store metadata, configuration, and state information. It complements Apache Kafka by acting as a metadata management and coordination layer in Kafka’s traditional architecture. ZooKeeper ensures reliability, consistency, and fault-tolerance in Kafka’s distributed setup.

Sparks

• Apache Spark is an open-source, distributed computing system designed for fast, large-scale data processing. It was built for performance, especially for iterative algorithms in data science and machine learning.

RHEL

• RHEL is a certified Linux operating system optimized for reliability, scalability, and security in business and production environments.

Ansible

• Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool developed by Red Hat that simplifies the management of servers, applications, and infrastructure. It allows DevOps and system administrators to automate tasks such as configuration management, software deployment, and orchestration. It uses simple, human-readable YAML files (called playbooks) and SSH

Prometheus

• Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that is used to collect, store and query metrics, for the monitoring of infrastructure, services, containers and microservices

Grafana

• Open-source analytics and visualization platform used for monitoring, observability, and alerting. Commonly used with Prometheus