AVP, Reliability Engineer - OnePay

** Role Summary/

Purpose:

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* The AVP, Reliability Engineer - One Pay plays a pivotal technical role within Synchrony Financial to ensure high availability, stability, security, and performance of applications supporting One Pay integrations. In order to provide operational excellence in a highly regulated environment, this role provides technical expertise and rigor to identify and remediate failures or looming issues that could negatively impact customer and partner experiences or prevent adherence to SLAs.

The ideal candidate excels at problem analysis, troubleshooting methods, and situational awareness within the context of distributed systems.

This is a hands-on technologist role requiring exposure to SRE and Dev Ops technology stacks and strong understanding of application support processes, including monitoring and addressing incidents/alerts across engineering applications and ensuring effective coordination and handoffs with vendors, partners, and internal Synchrony teams. The role also develops automation and leverages AIOps approaches to detect gaps, monitor trends, reduce operational toil, and expedite response and remediation.

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* Essential Responsibilities:

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* + Drive investigations with cross-functional teams to understand failures, analyze production defects, troubleshoot systems, identify root cause, and implement fixes to prevent recurrence.

+ Ensure the dependability, availability, and scalability of One Pay-integrated applications and services by partnering with application, platform, and infrastructure teams.

+ Enhance observability, including establishing and maintaining dashboards and monitoring capabilities (e.g., Splunk, New Relic, and similar tools), improving alert quality, and strengthening operational readiness.

+ Design and implement monitoring, alerting, and metrics to track and report adherence to service SLAs/SLOs, performance, and operational efficiency.

+ Develop automation and leverage AIOps to detect reliability gaps, monitor trends, reduce noise, and expedite incident response and restoration activities.

+ Continuously monitor the health and performance of engineering applications, production servers, and key service indicators; provide monitoring/reporting and recommendations as needed.

+ Support release and operational processes, including troubleshooting CI/CD pipeline issues (e.g., Jenkins pipelines) and coordinating releases with partner teams.

+ Participate in Agile sprints with cross-functional teams involving multiple technologies, personnel, and processes; contribute reliability requirements and improvements that support continuous delivery.

+ Support a root cause analysis discipline and continuous improvement practices that reduce downtime and increase resiliency.

+ Coordinate effectively with vendor partner teams and Synchrony teams to ensure seamless support handoffs and timely issue resolution.

+ Communicate the status of technical stacks, incidents, risks, and reliability initiatives to stakeholders and leadership, including partner-facing stakeholders as appropriate.

+ Work closely with an experienced staff comprising both Synchrony resources and third-party contractors.

+ Participate in an on-call rotation to respond to critical production issues.

+ Perform other duties and/or special projects as assigned.

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* Qualifications/Requirements:

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* + Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 5 years of relevant experience in application development, reliability engineering, systems engineering, and/or production application support (or equivalent practical experience) OR in lieu of a Degree, High School Diploma/GED and a minimum of 8+ years of experience of relevant experience.

+ Demonstrated experience troubleshooting and supporting distributed systems in cloud environments.

+ Good understanding of the nature of distributed systems and cloud providers.

+ Solid understanding of cloud concepts such as containerization, message queues, load balancing, data replication, and high availability patterns.

+ Understanding of IT application support processes, including incident management, problem resolution, and operational/support metrics used for decision-making.

+ Knowledgeable in UNIX Operating System fundamentals.

+ Familiar with network programming concepts and protocols.

+ Proficiency in Dev Ops concepts and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, including automation, monitoring, and reliability best practices.

+ Hands-on experience with scripting/automation in at least one language such as Python, Bash, JavaScript, Power Shell, Go, or similar.

+ Familiar with one or more configuration automation/tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.

+ Strong communication skills (verbal and written) and excellent interpersonal skills with ability to interact with multiple audiences, including clients/partners, developers, managers, and senior executives.

+ Customer-focus mindset; self-driven, detail-oriented; strong organizational and time management skills; ability to operate with limited…