Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Description

Who are we?

Western National Insurance Group is a private mutual insurance company with over 120 years of experience serving customers' property-and-casualty insurance needs in the Midwestern, Northwestern, and Southwestern United States. Known as “The Relationship Company®,” we define success as a measure of the relationships we’ve built over time. In everything that we do, we know that delivering a friendly and helpful interaction makes for a better experience for everyone involved. That’s the power of “nice”. At Western National, nice is something we work to bring to every person and organization with whom we partner and serve.

Does this opportunity interest you?

Western National is seeking a Site Reliability Engineer III to join our team!

The individual in this role will have the opportunity to design, implement, manage, and monitor on-premise and cloud-based application platforms. This individual monitors, resolves, and proactively prevents system outages and performance issues while partnering with product teams to improve application deployment, infrastructure stability, and reliability.

What are the responsibilities and opportunities of this role?

• Designs, deploys, and maintains scalable and secure platform infrastructure across cloud and on-premise environments. 
• Participates in work refinement and estimation processes with product teams. 
• Utilizes modern software delivery technologies to assist product teams with application deployments. 
• Leverages automation tools to ensure processes are repeatable and efficient. 
• Solicits and performs peer reviews of application and infrastructure designs and implementations in accordance with team, product, and organizational standards. 
• Recommends and designs solutions that improve application deployment and stability and trains product teams on how to use the solutions. 
• Creates and maintains documentation, including support processes, team processes, system documentation, and key decisions and discussions. 
• Ensures timely delivery of projects and tasks and communicates delays and roadblocks to the team and leadership as needed. 
• Supports noncore responsibilities as needed to ensure timely work delivery, including analysis, testing, and meeting facilitation. 
• Monitors and resolves system outages and performance issues of mixed impact with an emphasis on proactive resolution. 
• Collaboratively implements software application infrastructure modifications of mixed impact using software development best practices. 
• Prepares and executes fault tolerance and load testing to support robust application infrastructure design. 
• Researches and pilots opportunities to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability across systems, job functions, team-level processes, and business processes with an emphasis on quality and user experience. 
• Participates in and leads the troubleshooting, resolution, and communication of urgent production issues. 
• Recommends improvements to company guidelines to align with industry-standard system security best practices in partnership with the Security Office. 
• Provides technical expertise and leads projects in collaboration with other product teams. 
• Assists teams in adapting to new infrastructure and deployment technologies in accordance with industry standards. 
• Applies knowledge, experience, and creative resources to identify solutions to complex problems and effectively communicates the advantages and disadvantages of proposed solutions. 
• Consistently acts according to our customer experience standards, including responding quickly, maintaining a positive attitude, building rapport, demonstrating empathy, managing the customer’s expectations, using the proper communication channel for the situation, and taking ownership to ensure the customer’s issue is resolved. 
• Performs special projects and other duties as assigned.

Requirements

What are the must-have qualifications for a candidate?

• Strong mathematical, analytical, and problem-solving skills. 
• Ability to work independently and carry assignments through completion. 
• Strong attention to detail and quality. 
• Demonstrated advanced organizational and prioritization skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities of varying impact and risk within specified timeframes. 
• Proven ability to collaborate effectively with product team members and other teams. 
• Demonstrated intermediate knowledge and application of relevant project methodologies at the product-team level. 
• Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing, with technical and nontechnical audiences across all levels of the organization. 
• Strong expertise with general AWS cloud services. 
• Extensive experience with infrastructure-as-code concepts and tools, including Terraform, Helm charts, and YAML. 
• Strong expertise managing workloads in Kubernetes and/or EKS. 
• Strong understanding of system networks, networking, and related security best practices. 
• Strong proficiency with cloud-based CI / CD pipelines and commonly associated services. 
• Strong Linux operating system experience. 
• Experience working with virtualization technologies. 
• Experience deploying, maintaining, and using system monitoring and alerting solutions. 
• Advanced proficiency with applicable computer languages, software applications, infrastructure technologies, operating systems, and command-line tools. 
• Advanced proficiency with code versioning and deployment software and tools. 
• Broad exposure to and intermediate knowledge of multiple technology stacks, frameworks, and core systems. 
• Bachelor’s degree, associate degree, bootcamp certificate, or equivalent experience.

What will our ideal candidate have?

• Demonstrated ability to proactively mentor colleagues using one or more learning approaches to increase their effectiveness in areas of knowledge or skill. 
• Ability to effectively communicate with and influence product owners and product teams to prioritize technical product improvements that meet company standards. 
• One or more AWS certifications. 
• Ability to participate in a monthly on-call rotation.

Compensation overview

The targeted hiring range for this role is $112,300 - $160,600 annually. However, the base pay offered may vary depending on the job-related knowledge, skills, credentials, and experience of each candidate as well as other factors such as the scope and location of the role. Candidates looking for compensation outside of the posted range are encouraged to apply and will be considered based on their individual qualifications and/or may be considered for other positions.

Culture and Total Rewards

Western National has long been known as “The Relationship Company®” and caring for our employees is part of that relationship commitment. We value connectiveness, empowerment, and accountability, and we believe that our employees are our biggest asset. 

Currently ranked as the 41st largest private company by revenue in Minnesota (Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal), Western National has earned accolades year-over-year as an employer of choice and garnered multiple awards for wellness in the workplace. Western National has also been named a Top Workplace by the Star Tribune for consecutive years. In addition, the Group is consistently recognized as a Ward’s 50 property-and-casualty insurance company for its outstanding financial results.

Western National offers full-time employees a significant Total Rewards Package, including:

• Medical insurance plan options and other standard employee benefits, including dental insurance, vision benefits, life insurance, disability insurance, and more!
• Health Savings Accounts (HSA) and Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• 401(k) Plan (participants are eligible for 100% matching on the first 6% of their contributions)
• Wellbeing Program, including onsite fitness studio
• Paid Time Off – including holiday, vacation, and volunteer
• 100% company-paid tuition reimbursement for approved job-relevant coursework and access to The Institutes (Risk and insurance education)
• Paid parental leave
• Bonus opportunities

Western National believes in supporting balance between work and life by providing a flexible work environment, which includes a variety of hybrid and remote work arrangements designed to balance individual, job, department, and company needs. 

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

Western National provides employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.