Operations Specialist, Global Network Operations Center

Operations Specialists in our Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) use systems and network experience to provide proactive monitoring and incident response of services across our world-wide operations. The role is focused on rapid detection, triage, and mitigation of player-impacting issues and continuous improvement of service operations processes by adjusting monitoring, tuning signal to noise & correlation patterns, and updating documentation.
Blizzard's games and platforms reach a global audience of passionate gamers. The GNOC is the nexus between our games, platforms, and all the teams dedicated to creating and supporting them. Responsible for player and employee-facing services, Operations Specialists are the vanguard of service reliability, helping ensure that our creators can create and players can play.

As an Operations Specialist
Monitoring inbound communications from all streams to ensure incidents are identified and tracked
Employing your systems/network/cloud knowledge as a first responder to triage problems and improve accuracy of detection
Driving player and user impacting issues to resolution
Performing routine follow-ups on active incidents to ensure the resolution is progressing as expected
Processing routine requests for access, ACL, network, and systems maintenance
Adjusting alert triggers to reduce false positive alerts
Managing engagement, documentation, and stakeholder communications during critical service outages
Reviewing, correcting, and tuning documentation including but not limited to runbooks, troubleshooting guides, user guides, processes, and procedures
Building positive and collaborative relationships across the company

You may succeed in this role if you...
Love to solve novel and exciting problems
Are inspired to make everyone's job easier by improving workflows
Are comfortable digging through metrics, logs, and whatever other data is available to triage and fix an incident
Strive to be better, smarter, and faster every day
Enjoy trying innovative technologies to improve our processes and outcomes
Understand and accept the value of older technologies that serve our business needs
Like to collaborate with others to solve problems, share knowledge, and provide feedback
Inspired to provide critical insight to a process or problem and advocate for prioritization based on well-crafted analysis
Relish working with partners across all levels of the company to solve complex challenges and emergent issues
Help your peers succeed

Areas of Expertise for an Operations Specialist
Operations Specialists are expected to have fundamental knowledge of the technologies used across the enterprise.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of technologies Operations Specialists will work with:
Linux (bash, debugging, tuning)
Networking (triaging, packet loss, routing, ACLs)
Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Datadog, Cloudwatch, GCP Operations, LogicMonitor)
Alert Correlation Platforms (BigPanda, ScienceLogic, Tivoli/Netcool)
Cloud Services and Architecture (AWS, GCP, OpenStack)
Service Operations Framework/Workflows (ITIL, Incident/Problem/Event/Change Management, DMAIC)
Logging (Splunk, SysLog, ELK Stack, Linux Journal, grep)
Source Control (GitHub Enterprise, Perforce, SVN) CI/CD (Jenkins, Argo, Spinnaker)
Configuration Management (Puppet, Hiera, Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, Consul)
Container Computing (Docker, Kubernetes, Service Mesh)
Proxies and Load Balancing (Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy)