Unix Websphere Service Engineer Job in Northbrook 60062, Illinois US
The Allstate Corporation is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer. A Fortune 100 company, with $156 billion in assets, Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance, including auto, property, life and commercial. Allstate also offers retirement and investment products and banking services. Allstate is widely known through the “You’re In Good Hands With Allstate®” slogan. Allstate was founded in 1931 and became a publicly traded company in 1993.
Allstate is widely recognized as one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For in IT". Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek and Chicago magazines have also recognized us for our innovative and rewarding work environment. Allstate employs more than 4,000 information technology professionals that design and deliver innovative technology solutions for our businesses. We offer extensive benefits including major medical, dental, vision, tuition reimbursement, 401k and pension plans.
Good Work. Good Life. Good Hands.
The Service Engineer (SE) Sr. Consultant leads efforts to research, design, plan and maintain new or existing hardware and software technology components. The SE Sr. Consultant utilizes systems, scripting and developer skills to execute on tasks related to analysis, integration, and moderately to highly complex incidents and problems affecting production systems and multiple applications. This role also helps define and update items in the configuration management plan. This includes monitoring and controlling the performance and status of technology components, and providing technology component support and problem resolution.
This Service Engineer role is particular to UNIX (SUN Solaris) and WebSphere.
Primary responsibilities include:
· Lead the completion of the following activities (concerning new hardware and software technology components or enhancements to existing components): research, analysis, design, selection, planning, and engineering.
· Collaborate to build consensus with other Service Engineers to ensure that the modified hardware and software infrastructure interacts appropriately, data conversion impacts are considered, and other areas of impact are addressed and meet business function and performance requirements.
· Lead execution of testing, debugging, performance analysis, and documenting hardware and software technology components.
· Lead implementation of hardware and software technology components by analyzing the current system environment and infrastructure, using technical tools and utilities, and performing complex product customizations.
· Lead the support of production service requests, performing routine administration, and supporting hardware and software infrastructure.
· Lead complex, hardware and software technology component analysis, and evaluation on resource requirements necessary to maintain/expand service levels or tune hardware and software infrastructure components for optimum performance.
· Lead efforts to ensure plans integrate effectively with other aspects of the technical hardware and software components.
· Resolve incidents and perform root cause analysis, escalating high complexity incidents and problems to provide future application, hardware and/or software resiliency.
· Lead identifying and recommending major and significant changes for purposes of incident avoidance.
· Lead the development and update of the configuration management plan.
· Lead the effort to develop and maintain tools for the use of maintaining, modifying and monitoring hardware and software technology components.
· Lead the effort to determine the originating factors for a given incident and develop recommendations for preventing its repetition.
· Develop plans to meet required service levels; design data collection and reporting mechanisms for technology component health reporting.
- Support Technician and Sr. Technician level Service Engineers in project management, planning and estimating, reporting, scheduling, and workflow; guides junior level Service Engineers in these processes.
- Managing the definition and communication of incidents, issue logging and resolution process.
- Creating, updating and reviewing configuration management plans and collaborating with architects to ensure application architecture compliance.
- Supporting root-cause analysis to provide application hardware/software health and resiliency on complex incidents.
- Managing daily usage and requests for changes to the environments and investigating new tools for environment improvement.
- Directing analysts' activities to develop and maintain the production environment.
- Serving as lead for issue/problem resolution and assigning responsibility for problem resolution and workload balance.
- Directing recovery/roll-back and back-up efforts, defining vaulting plans, and defining business/information operating environment systems recovery.
- Developing/reviewing project plans and estimates for assigned environment management activities.
- Directing analyst(s) security work and serving as subject matter expert for security requirements.
The successful candidate should exhibit the following skills and abilities:
- Computer Operations Procedures - Solid understanding of a broad range of computer/network operations concepts, particularly SUN Solaris UNIX.
- Systems Migration - Ability to coordinate the move of several complex systems from one environment to another while redesigning elements to accommodate changes.
- Applications Operational Knowledge - Extensive knowledge and experience using the system with a clear understanding of operational and procedural aspects as well as the applications running on UNIX and WebSphere.
- Production Support Standards and Procedures - Demonstrates production support standards and procedures mastery which includes following standards and procedures without requiring support from others.
- Configuration Management - High-level of expertise using varied configuration tools in complex situations and achieving results without direct supervision.
- Change Management - Capable of achieving accurate results with challenging problems. Involved in establishing structured methodology for responding to change.
- Release Management - Capable of achieving accurate results working within scheduled time frames, and communicating clearly the changes to the Application Team and End-Users.
Experience required
4-6 years working with WebSphere on SUN Solaris UNIX, Storage, ITIL Foundation Certification. Ideally this candidate has worked on implementation using the iterative or agile project management methodologies.
Computer proficiency
- Websphere - 6.1 and 7.0, stand alone and clustered installs, Websphere feature packs, ihs plug in, apache, cells, nodes, clusters, deployment manager
- Solaris 10 - virtual environnements, containers/zones, ZFS,
- Java - JRE, JDK, Java tuning, Java memory management, heap size tuning and monitoring
- Necessary to be an expert with WebSphere because it's more heavily used than other application servers at Allstate and it is the application server standard for Allstate going forward.
- Application Development, Standards and Technologies - J2EE, CORBA, SOA
Deep understanding of middleware Java application frameworks, standards, technologies, and general interactions of J2EE application components and third party systems.
- Unix System Administration
It's critical that the person filling the middlware specialist role has strong Unix system administration skills. These skills will be used for general troubleshooting, and shell programming.
- Network Infrastructure
Good understanding of networks and network infrastructure. Needs to know enough to do standard troubleshooting of application problems where the network may be a contributor to the problem and interact with the network team to get the information he/she needs to troubleshoot the application problem.
- Tools - Monitoring tools, Troubleshooting tools
Experience with monitoring tools like Wily Introscope, Tivoli performance viewer, Sitescope, WebSphere Application Monitor is necessary. Troubleshooting tools are also important. Experience with Thread Analyzer, WebSphere tracing tools, Tivoli performance viewer, garbage collection analyzing tools among others.
- Troubleshooting
The ability to use the knowledge and experiences of the products and technologies
listed above to troubleshoot problems is the key to this position.
- Tuning - Application Server, JVM, OS, Web Server, Third Party Components
Deep experiences of Java applications, application servers, JVMs, operating systems, along with other components to tune application components while understanding the impacts of the tuning.
- Application Infrastructure
The environment analyst should recommend hardware upgrades or additional hardware. There may also be operating system configuration changes that would improve performance and throughput.
