Principal Engineer Software Engineering

Every day we deliver safe and secure energy to homes, communities, and businesses. We are there when people need us the most. We connect people to the energy they need for the lives they live. The pace of change in society and our industry is accelerating and our expertise and track record puts us in an unparalleled position to shape the sustainable future of our industry.

To be successful we must continue to anticipate the needs of our customers, reducing the cost of energy delivery today and pioneering the flexible energy systems of tomorrow. This requires us to deliver on our promises and always look for new opportunities to grow, both ourselves and our business.

IT and Digital works seamlessly to support and facilitate the National Grid group of diverse energy businesses to deliver technology which revolutionises the way we operate. As we lead the charge towards a carbon-free future, our teams are pioneering disruptive changes to our industry by working with agile methodologies and adopting digital mind-sets to drive efficiency, effectiveness and bring new capabilities for our internal and external customers.

Our work here is critical. National Grid moves energy to millions of homes and businesses in the UK and US and the technology we utilise to complete that task is down to us. This role is at the centre of facilitating the energy revolution and enabling National Grid to continue to be a leading multi-national energy company. It's imperative that you have a passion for energy and solving the problems of today, tomorrow and beyond to ensure a secure, reliable and accessible energy system for all.

National Grid is hiring a Principal Dynatrace Software Engineer. This is a hybrid role based which is open to our offices in Waltham, MA, or Syracuse and Brooklyn, NY.

National Grid IT team is currently seeking an innovative, adaptable, and results-oriented individual to work in the monitoring and observability team within our Software Engineering team. This individual will provide the business knowledge and technical expertise to implement strategies, evaluate products, and build upon an infrastructure that supports the ever-changing needs of our customers. The successful candidate will work hand-in-hand with Business Leads, Product owners, IT Business Partners, and IT Project Managers to roadmap, plan, and deliver on environment build-outs.

As part of the Platform Performance Management team within the Platform Engineering and Operations group, the Performance Management Engineer maintains the enterprise application and platform performance monitoring systems. The role includes working with business and technical teams to enroll new and existing applications and services in enterprise monitoring and observability tools, define and implement monitoring alerts, configure monitoring tools for effective use by application teams, and bridge performance monitoring and performance analytics tools to facilitate real-time and historical visibility of instrumented applications and services.

The Engineer focuses on customer service and rigorously practices operational discipline in instrumenting and maintaining performance monitoring tools and methodologies. The Engineer also provides subject matter expertise and support for application and service owners who are diagnosing performance issues and forecasting capacity needs.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

• Maintain and support performance monitoring platforms and tools.

• Develop custom extensions to enable monitoring of enterprise platforms and systems as well as external systems, including Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.

• Work with platform and application owners to:

• Establish end-to-end visibility objectives for critical platforms and applications.

• Clarify monitoring requirements and business needs.

• Instrument monitoring tools to meet agreed-upon requirements.

• Work with technical and business teams to proactively review performance monitoring efficacy and identify opportunities for improvement.

• Maintain professional affiliations to stay on top of evolving performance monitoring and observability strategies and technologies.

• Utilize standard work and project management tools and adhere to standard change management protocols.

• Perform all other duties as assigned.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience required.

• 10+ years of prior experience in performance monitoring and management.

• Knowledge of, and demonstrated experience with, monitoring and key performance indicators on:

• Windows and Unix servers

• Storage and virtualization platforms

• Public cloud platforms and services

• Software as a Service (SaaS) providers

• Extensive experience with performance monitoring tools and, ideally, with modern full-stack observability tools.

• Extensive experience with Dynatrace is strongly preferred, including developing custom extensions.

• Extensive experience with DQL is strongly required.
• Dynatrace certification is preferred

• Familiarity with RESTful API integration in monitoring tools.

• Familiarity with application and service design and architecture principles.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

• Demonstrated ability to interact with all levels of the organization.

• Demonstrated commitment to the delivery of high-quality customer service.

• Demonstrated experience as a collaborator, working across different teams/groups and with vendors to achieve results.

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