Berkley Technology Services (BTS) is the dynamic technology solution for W. R. Berkley Corporation, a Fortune 500 Commercial Lines Insurance Company. With key locations in Urbandale, IA, Wilmington, DE, and Manassas, VA, BTS provides innovative and customer-focused IT solutions to the majority of WRBC’s 60+ operating units across the globe. BTS’s wide reach ensures that ideas and opinions are considered at every level of the organization to guarantee we find the best solutions possible. 

Driven by a commitment to collaboration, BTS acts as consultants to our customers and Operating Units by providing comprehensive solutions that not only address the challenge at hand, but proactively plan for the “What’s Next” in our industry and beyond. 

 With a culture centered on innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, BTS stands as a community of technology leaders with eyes toward the future -- leaders who truly care about growing not only their team members, but themselves, and take pride in their employees who shine. BTS offers endless ways to get involved and have the chance to grow your career into a wide range of roles you'd never known existed. Come join us as we push forward into the future of industry-leading technological solutions. 

Berkley Technology Services: Right Team, Right Technology, Simple and Secure.  

The DevOps Staff Engineer will play a visible and influential leadership role to evolve and maintain our Azure environments and services.  This role is intended to be a technically deep resource that seeks to implement automation through infrastructure and development pipelines and act as the subject-matter-expert for Azure tools and services.  This resource will also leverage best practices for configuring and maintaining Azure resources, including VMs, databases, and storage.  This role helps establish technical standards and patterns, creates tools and automated workflow capabilities, and builds cloud ecosystems that foster a high degree of innovation and enablement.

Staff Engineers lead deep, complex, or high-risk technical projects, and control the communication around them.  They support the organization by providing context and technical direction, defining technical specifications, and documenting processes.  They also play an important coaching and mentoring role by sharing best practices with other engineers and creating new opportunities for their growth.  They contribute to technical performance reviews, aiming to improve the technical capacity of the entire engineering organization.

Solutions Development

• Facilitate innovation by leading Azure-based projects for the enterprise; including migrations from on-premises, CICD pipelines, rehydration practices, managing containers, cloud security, and elastic computing.
• Work with development teams, DevOps teams, and InfoSec teams on building technical solutions that leverage established patterns for Azure and follow architecture strategies and guidelines.
• Establish and implement cost containment practices that provide robust guardrails and effectively balance developer productivity with controlling consumption-based cost challenges.
• Help evolve Azure solutions to a self-service deployment model.
• Rationalize technology and tool recommendations.
• Integrate solutions into the larger technical ecosystem to maximize impact and value.

Patterns and Standards Development

• Identify pattern and standard gaps for Azure development and/or administrative services and determine potential options to address.
• Research, develop, and drive the adoption of cloud-based design patterns and standards; align to Azure best practices.
• Perform Azure technology and tool evaluations, including proof-of-concept and feasibility analysis.
• Maintain contact with vendors, industry peers, and professional associations to keep informed of existing and emerging Azure trends, standards, and technologies.
• Publish thorough documentation of Azure standards/patterns and drive adoption across business and technical areas.

Operations and Support

• Troubleshoot incidents, identify root cause, and implement automated preventative measures (e.g., “self-healing”) for Azure infrastructure, tools, and services.
• Help manage and maintain Azure environments in accordance with corporate, security, and compliance standards.
• Develop and implement Azure service health and operational monitoring, including performance, availability, capacity utilization, redundancy, and cost.

Leadership and Mentoring

• Contribute to the internal cloud and architecture communities by participating in online forums, developing standards and patterns, and documenting solutions designs, which are shared across the community.
• Develop strong relationships with other business and technical teams and mentor less experienced developers and/or engineers in the development of their cloud skills.
• Participate in prioritization and other DevOps work planning activities.
• Be visible and inspire others to engage with and follow WRB’s cloud and technical strategies.

Required

• 7+ years progressive engineering experience developing/engineering solutions and leading multiple large-scale cross-domain engineering initiatives.
• 6+ years hands-on experience in multiple Azure technical domains (DevOps/DevSecOps, Cloud Security, Cloud Networking, Cloud Storage, Cloud Data, Cloud Services, Virtual Desktop, High-Availability, etc.)
• 4+ years hands-on experience with DevOps/DevSecOps services and practices in the Azure environment, including CICD pipelines, blue-green deployments, canary testing, code scanning, regression suite enablement, and infrastructure as code (IaC).
• 3+ years hands-on experience using IAM, certificate, token/key generation and management, secure parameters, and code scanning tools within cloud applications and platforms.
• 2+ years hands-on experience with microservices, Docker, Kubernetes, and AKS.
• Extensive knowledge of both native and third-party cloud tools for development, administration, and management of Azure environments, applications, and services.
• Ability to communicate complex ideas into technical implementation requirements
• Experience working in an agile environment focusing on iterative delivery
• Ability to convey complex problems (technical or organizational) concisely, accompanied by thoughtfully proposed solutions
• Performs work independently but is also comfortable in a team setting.
• Uses advanced techniques, theories, and processes to complete work.
• Ability to thrive and produce results with little or no supervision in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment.
• Excellent communication skills with ability to interact seamlessly at all levels with both technical and business stakeholders.
• Superior problem solving and analytical skills.
• Written Expression: Strong communicator, in both oral and written form
• Ability to leverage resources that are not assigned to the team
• Assistance with recruitment and onboarding of new team members, both junior and senior

Preferred

• 3+ years using Agile development methodologies.
• 2+ years hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or other commercially available public cloud environment
• Work history in the financial services or insurance industries.

Practical Skills Competencies:

• Self-Starter
• Personal Ownership
• Influential
• Critical Thinking
• Creative Thinking
• Commandership Skills
• Balanced Approach