With more than 5,000 global education clients, Blackboard is shaping the future of education services delivery around the world. We’re at the intersection of technology and education in a time of amazing innovation and disruption, and we’re serious about reimagining how education services are developed and delivered, and we need you for that!
As the Site Director within the Learn Operations organization at Blackboard, you will be responsible for managing a team of systems engineers and systems administrators responsible for Tier 1 and Tier 2 support of our flagship Learn application in both our managed hosting and cloud SaaS offerings. You will also lead a small team of QA testers, responsible for testing our application before release.
Work with Product Development teams to establish joint operational priorities.
Oversee 24x7 emergency on-call rotation.
Deploy, and maintain high-availability Linux systems, with a continuing focus on standardization of administration and configuration.
Develop automation tools for maintenance, troubleshooting, and administration.
Configure and manage performance monitoring tools and notification services.
Undertake various housekeeping and reporting functions for the areas of responsibility, including product deployments, upgrades & maintenance.
Develop and implement a plan of continual improvement.
Drive the team’s efforts for improving our automated tests and reduce time to market for our SaaS offering.
Uses data to measure and improve overall team productivity and product quality
Provide timely and transparent written status reports that highlight both successes and challenges.
Collaborate with other members of the Learn product development staff to develop a true sense of shared responsibility & energy for the entire product, from conception thru deployment.
Recruit, mentor, organize, motivate and coach a team of 24x7 engineering and operations professionals. Assign projects and arrange training to advance the career of each individual within the team. Define and monitor goals.
Identify and coach future leaders to take on additional personnel and technical responsibility
Bring a deep understanding of Quality Assurance in a team, and a proven track record of shipping software on time with countable quality
Be a very strong leader, mentor, recruiter, and people manager
Nurtures a collaborative environment across multiple geos and functional teams.
Providing leadership and guidance in all aspects of deployments, monitoring, reports, and tools.
Proactively identify opportunities to eliminate manual efforts via the development / adoption of the appropriate tools/scripts.
Work closely with both internal and external teams and vendors to guarantee continuous uptime, delivery on Service Level Agreements and maintaining site performance and operations.
Work as an integral player in a team that depends on each and every one working together in a short delivery cycle.
Lead a world class team of engineers and administrators responsible for supporting and maintaining a highly available application in use by hundreds of institutions and millions of users worldwide.
Accelerate the push to move all infrastructure from self-managed data centers to AWS.
Track operating costs for all non-production and production systems and react when costs are abnormal.
Manage and a maintain a cohesive view between both product offerings, handling operations metrics, version management, and driving process improvements.
Standardize monitoring and reporting across several data centers in both private- and public-clouds.
Work to ensure that native and cloud-based product infrastructure is scaled to meet future product and service needs.
PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS
REQUIRED SKILLS:
Experience managing SysOps or DevOps teams. Expertise and working knowledge of network/server infrastructure running in virtualized and cloud environments.
Experience working in an and leading a 24x7x365 Operations environment.
Working with in distributed systems and manage multiple function teams
Experienced in managing teams in an agile environment
Track record of hiring great engineers and building strong teams.
Track record of identifying productivity opportunities and taking the appropriate remedial action
Track record of influencing a US based management team
Always looking to uncover the root cause of any issue
Experience with and solid understanding of web and app servers, Apache Tomcat and Nginx. Scripting in Chef, Perl, Python, etc.
Experience with JIRA bug tracking system
Strong communication skills with an ability to listen and be heard
Self-starter, collaborative team player
Experience with Linux in a production environment
Experience troubleshooting and resolving application and/or system-related issues
Strong written and spoken English
Track, measure and maintain uptime, incident response, and issue resolution times in accordance with service level agreements 24x7x365.
Own incident management and problem management processes for the team to drive continuous improvement for end user experience and SLA guarantees.
Strong understanding how to configure and deploy Linux servers programmatically in cloud infrastructures.
Ability to work independently and within a geographically distributed team.
Minimum of a bachelor’s degree; with over 10 years’ work-related experience in a relevant technical discipline.
Effectively communicates among peers and with management
Ability to manage multiple, concurrent projects and tasks with overlapping deliverable dates
PREFERRED SKILLS:
Experience with large scale software development processes and multi-region deployments
Experience in installing, monitoring and maintaining Linux servers in the cloud, esp. in AWS
Ability and desire to find and resolve outages, scalability, performance and reliability problems even if you have to dig into assembly code.
Worked with Open Source Tools & Software
Previous experience in the education industry and e-learning technologies
Background in content/knowledge management, digital asset management, as well as with education related technologies.
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