Principal Engineer - Performance Architect

Job Description

O.C. Tanner is the global leader in software and services that improve workplace culture through meaningful employee experiences. Our Culture Cloud is a suite of apps designed to enhance the employee experience with strategic recognition, service awards, wellbeing, leadership, and events that help people thrive at work. Our Culture by Design approach provides expert services to organizations looking to create great workplaces.

Our global team of 1,500 people hail from 58 countries and speak 62 languages. As programmers, researchers, designers, client professionals and craftspeople we create the tech, tools and awards that connect employees to purpose at thousands of companies.

Join us as we help people all over the world thrive at work. Here is where we need you most:

As a Principal Engineer - Performance Architect for the O.C. Tanner Company, you will be vital to our success. A Performance Architect's purpose is to close the feedback loop of performance testing. In a microservices environment, you will identify the root causes of performance issues in the system. You will recommend, and in some cases contribute to, specific solutions to the problems that you identify. This responsibility spans multiple disciplines, including front end, back end, database, infrastructure, and system architecture. Your work will be highly visible and valuable to the company as we continue to scale our systems to meet the growing demands of a growing client base.

Other responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Work autonomously and advise architecture leadership with additional input, direction, and vision for O.C. Tanner's product and platform implementations
• Establish relationships and build trust among principal engineers and engineering teams. You will use these connections and communication skills to discover technical requirements that cut across our custom-developed products.
• Work on a team of architects as you guide other engineering teams
• Participate as a decision-maker in the Architecture Coalition process, assessing and approving preliminary designs
• Engage with the Enterprise Architect and Director of Enterprise Architecture to help set short term and long-term vision of technology built at OC Tanner
• Guide and consult with other engineering teams on critical design or performance issues
• Review performance test results and identify bottlenecks of the system
• Understand system functionality and identify areas of the architecture that may not scale logarithmically
• Identify unscalable SQL queries and structures, and suggest and implement solutions that include remodeling, indexing, and query optimization
• Establish performance benchmarks for other architects and engineers to help meet in the various areas of technology
• Conduct code reviews and approve pull requests based on standards you have helped to establish
• Create, publish, and evangelize development standards and guides
• Contribute to cross-team libraries or services that create consistency of developer experience across all of software engineering
• Evaluate and recommend technology choices to proactively meet O.C. Tanner business strategy

Job Requirements

Required Qualifications

• BA/BS degree or 15+ years of professional or military experience
• 15+ years of IT Infrastructure experience
• Experience facilitating discussions with senior leadership regarding technical / architectural trade-offs, best practices, and risk mitigation
• Direct hands-on experience leading the design, development and deployment of business software at scale or current hands on technology infrastructure, network, compute, storage, and virtualization experience
• Experience with software development life cycle (SDLC) and agile/iterative methodologies
• Experience optimizing data structure, indexes, and queries on an RDBMS
• Proficiency in identifying and solving scale-related issues
• Good understanding of front-end rendering and the things that can cause front end problems at scale
• Experience with data caching strategies

Preferred Qualifications

• Computer Science, Engineering or Math background preferred
• Hands-on, in-depth knowledge of AWS services (EC2, ELB, RDS, Route53 S3)
• Strong track record of implementing AWS services in a variety of distributed computing environments
• Ability to think strategically about business, product, and technical challenges
• Leading highly-available and fault-tolerant enterprise and web-scale software deployments