Blizzard Entertainment

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Release Manager, Global Network Operations Center (Finance)



Team Name:
IT - Network Operations

Job Title:
Release Manager, Global Network Operations Center

Requisition ID:
R026019

Job Description:

Your Mission

At Blizzard Entertainment, Release Managers (RM) in our Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) work collaboratively with a wide cross section of departments to ensure smooth and stable launches of our titles, seasons, and special projects. Additionally, outside of these duties - Release Managers support the broader GNOC work: incident management, change management, problem management, and knowledge management functions that are required to keep Blizzard players in the game. A Release Manager records all issues, challenges, and barriers encountered during launches and works with partner teams to prevent similar problems in the future.

Blizzard's games and platforms reach a global audience of passionate gamers. The GNOC is the nexus point between our games, platforms, and all the teams dedicated to creating and supporting them. During launch windows, the Release Manager is responsible for providing continual support to game teams and partner teams to ensure release steps are being completed on time and without issue. Outside of launch windows, they are responsible for player and employee-facing services, as the Release Manager serves as both an on-call incident manager and incident analyst. The Release Manager will use data, metrics, and their analysis to work with OpsCenter management and recommend improvements to our release management, incident management, change management, problem management, and knowledge management functions that ensure our creators can create and players can play.

This position is eligible for remote work

What you bring to the table

The video game industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners. Therefore, this role includes, but is not limited to, the following responsibilities:

  • Building positive and collaborative relationships across the company
  • Proposing process improvements and automation to support our release, incident, and problem management goals
  • Leading release, deployment, or related conference calls both during and outside of normal working hours
  • Participating in both pre and post launch activities to ensure improvements to the overall Blizzard Release processes
  • Partnering with inter-departmental workgroups and v-teams to solve challenges related to Releases
  • Data-first approach in measuring success: utilize reporting and analytics, tracking and monitoring of improvements against key performance metrics
  • Playing major role in investigations for root cause of on-going and past, most impactful incidents affecting releases and generally
  • Driving rapid recovery and resolution of widespread incidents, in an on-call role both during and outside of normal working hours

You may succeed in this role if you...

  • Love to solve novel and exciting problems
  • Find joy in connecting the right people to tackle challenging issues
  • Have the habit of being first to break the ice
  • Are inspired to make everyone's job easier by improving process
  • Strive to be better, smarter, and faster tomorrow than you are today
  • Enjoy trying new technologies and trends to improve what we're doing today

Types of projects you may work on...

  • Launching new titles, seasons, and special events for Blizzard titles and Battle.net platform titles
  • Helping deliver successful BlizzCon, Game tradeshows, and similar live events
  • Evaluation and tuning of existing processes
  • Sponsoring creation of new (or enhancing existing) tools supporting processes owned by the Operations Center
  • Collaborating with service owners to find opportunities to reduce interrupt work and negative player experience caused by incidents

Player Profile
Minimum Requirements

  • Release Managers are expected to be intensely curious and tenacious in pursuit of answers.
  • Release Managers at Blizzard should embrace the spotlight as they will be responsible for coordination and collaboration on the highest visibility projects.
  • Release Managers at Blizzard are expected to have an aptitude for picking up new technologies and procedures that are used across the enterprise. Here's a non-exhaustive list of technologies Release Managers may be exposed to:
    • Service Operations Framework/Workflows (ITIL, Incident/Problem/Event/Change Management, DMAIC)
    • Process workflows and value stream analyses (BPMN, Microsoft Visio, Draw.io, Gliffy)
    • ITSM issue tracking software (JIRA, ServiceNow, Remedy)
    • Automated engagement engines (xMatters, PagerDuty, VictorOps, OpsGenie)
    • Collaboration and documentation software (Confluence, Sharepoint, Google Workspace, Slack, Teams)
    • Monitoring/Logging/Visualization (Prometheus, Kibana, Grafana, Elasticsearch, LogicMonitor, Datadog, Cloudwatch, GCP Operations, Kentik, Guardian)
    • Alert Correlation Platforms (BigPanda, ScienceLogic, Tivoli/Netcool)
    • Cloud Services and Architecture (Azure, AWS, GCP, OpenStack, Alibaba Cloud)
    • BI / Reporting tools: (Tableau, PowerBI)

Our World

Activision Blizzard, Inc., is one of the world's largest and most successful interactive entertainment companies and is at the intersection of media, technology and entertainment. We are home to some of the most beloved entertainment franchises including Call of Duty®, World of Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, Candy Crush ™ and Bubble Witch™. Our combined entertainment network delights hundreds of millions of monthly active users in 196 countries, making us the largest gaming network on the planet!

Our ability to build immersive and innovative worlds is only enhanced by diverse teams working in an inclusive environment. We aspire to have a culture where everyone can thrive in order to connect and engage the world through epic entertainment. We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for 'Every World ' - we've got our employees covered!

The videogame industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners.

We love hearing from anyone who is enthusiastic about changing the games industry. Not sure you meet all qualifications ? Let us decide! Research shows that women and members of other under-represented groups tend to not apply to jobs when they think they may not meet every qualification, when, in fact, they often do! We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment and strongly encourage you to apply.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable assistance to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you are a disabled individual requiring an accommodation to apply for an open position, please email your request to accommodationrequests@activisionblizzard.com. General employment questions cannot be accepted or processed here. Thank you for your interest.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, among other characteristics.

Rewards

We provide a suite of benefits that promote physical, emotional and financial well-being for 'Every World' - we've got our employees covered! Subject to eligibility requirements, the Company offers comprehensive benefits including:

  • Medical, dental, vision, health savings account or health reimbursement account, healthcare spending accounts, dependent care spending accounts, life and AD&D insurance, disability insurance;
  • 401(k) with Company match, tuition reimbursement, charitable donation matching;
  • Paid holidays and vacation, paid sick time, floating holidays, compassion and bereavement leaves, parental leave;
  • Mental health & wellbeing programs, fitness programs, free and discounted games, and a variety of other voluntary benefit programs like supplemental life & disability, legal service, ID protection, rental insurance, and others;
  • If the Company requires that you move geographic locations for the job, then you may also be eligible for relocation assistance.

Eligibility to participate in these benefits may vary for part time and temporary full-time employees and interns with the Company. You can learn more by visiting https://www.benefitsforeveryworld.com/ .

In the U.S., the standard base pay range for this role is $38.85 - $71.83 Hourly. These values reflect the expected base pay range of new hires across all U.S. locations. Ultimately, your specific range and offer will be based on several factors, including relevant experience, performance, and work location. Your Talent Professional can share this role's range details for your local geography during the hiring process. In addition to a competitive base pay, employees in this role may be eligible for incentive compensation. Incentive compensation is not guaranteed. While we strive to provide competitive offers to successful candidates, new hire compensation is negotiable. Apply

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