Site Reliability Engineer

The Area:

Morningstar believes in empowering investors through research, data, design, and technology. Morningstar Direct (https://www.morningstar.com/products/direct) is Morningstar’s flagship software product that helps Asset and Wealth Managers build and manage their portfolios and communicate with their clients. Our team is modernizing the core Direct product using web & desktop technologies, cloud-based infrastructure, and a refreshed product strategy. Our core offering is complemented by a variety of reporting and analytical products including our next generation tool, Analytics Lab (https://www.morningstar.com/products/direct/analytics-lab). We aim to provide a first-class experience in accessing, analyzing, and reporting on Morningstar research and data. We are deeply inquisitive; we do not take “that’s just the way it’s always been done” or “that’s just best practice” as valid answers and instead seek to fine-tune our product development process for maximum impact. We are empowered professionals who are given problems to solve and not tickets to implement. We value team productivity over individual productivity and this culture of “giving” means we enjoy and highly value collaborating with our teammates.

The Role:

As an Associate Site Reliability (SRE)/DevOps Engineer, you will be responsible for the availability, automation, performance, efficiency, scaling, monitoring and emergency response for servers and services internally and externally for Morningstar Direct and its clients. You will use your understanding of platforms, architecture, people, systems, and processes to both establish and continuously improve SLIs and SLOs for uptime, performance, deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or higher or previous experience in a technical support role.
• 1-2 years of experience

Responsibilities:

• Maintain and support the products and data systems: proactively monitor events, investigate issues, analyze solutions, and drive problems through to resolution.
• Engage in continuous improvement and innovation within the team.
• Define requirements and develop tools, alerting, and reporting as needed.
• Work with the product team to define application hardening and define opportunities for chaos engineering.
• Use operational tools and monitoring platforms to gain in-depth knowledge and understanding of system availability, performance, and capacity.
• Work with business partners to establish Service Level Indicators and Objectives (SLIs and SLOs).
• Implement alerting strategy that makes alerts actionable and unique.
• Provide follow-through to ensure issues are resolved to satisfaction.
• Assist with server management and support.
• Implement best practices, develop efficiencies, and improve department’s scalability.
• You will be required to be part of an on-call rotation.
• You will work very closely with other groups to resolve problems, deploy and release new products and create solutions to provide world-class service, solutions, and support.
• Embrace collaboration, open communication, and reach across functional borders.

Requirements:

• Basic understanding of build, release, and configuration management practices.
• Strong analytical, interpersonal, written and verbal communication skills.
• Passionate about staying current on trends and best practices in software development, devops, and Site Reliability Engineering.
• Knowledge of IT environments, technologies, system hosting infrastructure, including cloud providers and their platforms.
• General knowledge of source control tools (Git, CodeCommit, etc.) and branching strategies.
• General knowledge of build/release tools (Jenkins, uDeploy, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, etc.).
• Basic understanding of monitoring strategies and tools.

Bonus Qualifications

• Demonstrable understanding of Infrastructure as Code (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt Stack, Terraform).
• Experience programming in one or more popular languages such as Python, Java, C#, JavaScript, Ruby, PowerShell, etc.
• System administration experience with Windows.
• Working experience with Amazon Web Services.

Morningstar’s hybrid work environment gives you the opportunity to work remotely and collaborate in-person each week. We’ve found that we’re at our best when we’re purposely together on a regular basis, at least three days each week. A range of other benefits are also available to enhance flexibility as needs change.