Staff Platform Engineer

at  OANDA

Everyone at OANDA is focused on our vision to transform how our customers can meet all their currency needs. We are revolutionising the world of currency trading by providing innovative trading experiences, currency data and analytics solutions. Dare to be open, bold, focused - own it and apply! The future is now!
How do we work?
As a member of the Platform Engineering team at OANDA, you are responsible for providing the infrastructure to efficiently and reliably serve our applications to OANDA customers. You will work with other technical and non-technical teams within OANDA and manage the underlying hardware and operating systems to deliver a high-availability, fault-tolerant global platform spanning on-premise and multi-cloud environments. In addition, you will provide a platform for application delivery based on modern orchestration and automation tools to enable the product development teams to quickly and safely deploy, while ensuring continued adherence to OANDA’s security and engineering standards.

Responsibilities:

• System Knowledge: Mastery of one or more on premise or cloud technologies. Good advanced understanding of all infrastructure. Infrastructure as Code minded. Works effectively on their own. Viewed as a source of knowledge.
• System Architecture: Solid understanding of environment design on-premise/in the cloud or both. Able to identify possible points of concerns with related processes or projects and design accordingly. Ability to pick up on external team dependencies. Ability to identify where own work will impact external teams and work with those teams to ensure proper design outcome. Adheres to best practices. Leads design discussions.
• On-Call & Triage: Will take part in both of the teams rotations, oncall and triage.
• Security: Ensures adherence to security principles and responds to deficiencies. Identifies and improves security principles based on organizations requirements.
• Monitoring: Monitors all aspects of the environments under management, including but not limited to golden signals, associated costs/spend and overall performance
• Planning & Execution: Effectively estimates the amount of work that they can accomplish in a sprint. Able to manage incoming on demand work vs planned work and discern which things need to be done immediately vs those that can go to the backlog and be estimated and planned. Ability to properly estimate tasks, understand when to break them up into smaller workable units of effort. Actively pursues stakeholders in other parts of the organization for requirements when designing or implementing a solution. Should be competent in running a project and managing timelines and expectations.
• Communication: Values and encourages feedback and constructive criticism of ideas/designs. Provide feedback and ideas to others in a productive manner. Provides feedback on teams and staff to management. Effectively communicates theories/ideas/designs to non-technical people in a way that can
• Team Process & Improvement: Continually leading by example ,works to improve the team processes with improvements/refinements. Leads and contributes to retros.
• Documentation: Creates clear, concise documentation and designs. Updates existing documentation as necessary.

Skills & Behavioural Competencies:

• General Abilities: Ability to understand a wide range of infrastructure and systems. Takes ownership of those items the team is responsible for. Superior troubleshooting skills and methods. Assists developers to adhere to designs and ensure proper use.
• Scripting Capability: Proficient in working in one common scripting language as well as with code based infrastructure and tooling. Reviews scripts/IaC for correctness and best practice.
• Technical Skills: You are expected to have a high level expertise in all facets of either cloud infrastructure or an on premise environment, and well versed in both. This includes, but not limited to; Networking, Storage and Compute, both OS (Windows, Linux) and hardware levels. You should have a solid troubleshooting ability and methodology. Mastery of infrastructure services such as AD, LDAP, DNS, NTP, logging, monitoring is also expected.
• Architecture: Able to contribute to overall infrastructure architecture and service design and implementation.
• Presenting: Presents kickoffs/plans/updates to the team. Able to plan and produce clear and concise presentations for consumption by other technical teams as well as own team.
• Teamwork: Able to bring diverse opinions together to reach agreement on solutions within the team. Deals with unavoidable changes constructively. Works well with other teams on projects/tasks (internal and 3rd party).
• Initiative: Self starter, actively finds deficiencies that need updating in all infrastructure. Able to work either independently or in a team on a project/tasks and may act as a project lead.
• Mentoring: Presents as a resource within the team for understanding or assessing problems/tasks. Works to build team skillset actively.
• Ownership: Takes initiative on projects, driving their planning and progress. Takes ownership of processes, projects and products. Has the ability to make good decisions on their own considering the ecosystem of OANDA.
• Interviewing: Contributes to job descriptions. Participates in the interview process to evaluate new candidates. Contributes to pre-interview set up and planning as well as providing thoughtful feedback on candidate performance during interview
• Conflict Management: Understands how to deal with minor interpersonal conflicts with team members and when to escalate to either a manager or HR
• Resource Planning: Efficiently plans tasks and projects with documented milestones and resources required to reach them. Able to provide detailed planning for projects with costing estimates, workforce requirements and budget references.
• Managing Complexity: Asks questions to encourage others to think differently and enrich their analyses of complex situations. Accurately defines the key elements of complex, ambiguous situations
• Customer Service: Keeps in contact with customers to ensure problems are resolved, or to improve customer service. Studies customer feedback and emerging customer needs and uses these to determine some creative new ideas.

Qualifications:

• General Education: University Degree or equivalent working experience
• General Experience: 6+ years experience in related field
• Preferred: Certifications: Linux, Windows, Cloud Infrastructure related certification(s)

Work environment

• Office / Home Office / Co-location facilities
• Participate in on-call rotation
• Able to lift up to 50lbs for data center rack and stack

OANDA Global Corporation is a diverse and global team with offices around the world. We value the unique skills and experiences each individual brings to OANDA. We are committed to creating and sustaining a collegial work environment in which all individuals are treated with dignity and respect and one which reflects the diversity of the community in which we operate. We provide an inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. Candidates selected for an interview will be contacted directly. If you require accommodation during the recruitment and selection process, please let us know. We will work with you to provide as seamless a recruitment experience as possible.
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• System Knowledge: Mastery of one or more on premise or cloud technologies. Good advanced understanding of all infrastructure. Infrastructure as Code minded. Works effectively on their own. Viewed as a source of knowledge.
• System Architecture: Solid understanding of environment design on-premise/in the cloud or both. Able to identify possible points of concerns with related processes or projects and design accordingly. Ability to pick up on external team dependencies. Ability to identify where own work will impact external teams and work with those teams to ensure proper design outcome. Adheres to best practices. Leads design discussions.
• On-Call & Triage: Will take part in both of the teams rotations, oncall and triage.
• Security: Ensures adherence to security principles and responds to deficiencies. Identifies and improves security principles based on organizations requirements.
• Monitoring: Monitors all aspects of the environments under management, including but not limited to golden signals, associated costs/spend and overall performance
• Planning & Execution: Effectively estimates the amount of work that they can accomplish in a sprint. Able to manage incoming on demand work vs planned work and discern which things need to be done immediately vs those that can go to the backlog and be estimated and planned. Ability to properly estimate tasks, understand when to break them up into smaller workable units of effort. Actively pursues stakeholders in other parts of the organization for requirements when designing or implementing a solution. Should be competent in running a project and managing timelines and expectations.
• Communication: Values and encourages feedback and constructive criticism of ideas/designs. Provide feedback and ideas to others in a productive manner. Provides feedback on teams and staff to management. Effectively communicates theories/ideas/designs to non-technical people in a way that can
• Team Process & Improvement: Continually leading by example ,works to improve the team processes with improvements/refinements. Leads and contributes to retros.
• Documentation: Creates clear, concise documentation and designs. Updates existing documentation as necessary