TechOps Engineer

Role Summary:

We are seeking a Technical Operations Engineer to support the Staples Promotional Products application portfolio. This hands-on engineering role will focus on proactive application health management, daily operational review, observability support, technical incident investigation, environment validation, runbook execution, operational automation, and backup support for core DevOps delivery processes.

The role is intended for an engineer who can help SPP become more proactive and efficient by identifying issues before business users report them, improving dashboard and alert coverage, producing clear investigation summaries, turning recurring operational work into repeatable processes or automation, and providing operational continuity when the primary DevOps Engineer is unavailable or release activity requires additional support. The engineer will not own release governance, release scheduling, release communications, or DevOps management responsibilities; those responsibilities remain with the DevOps Manager.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Perform a daily operational health review for critical SPP applications, integrations, scheduled jobs, services, and business-critical paths using New Relic or similar observability tools.

• Review overnight and current-day alerts, error spikes, failed jobs, integration failures, service health indicators, and recurring support patterns to identify concerns before they become business-impacting incidents.

• Maintain a practical daily operations view or health summary that identifies green/yellow/red application status, open risks, investigation needs, and follow-up actions for the SPP technology team.

• Create and maintain New Relic dashboards or similar operational dashboards that provide actionable visibility into application availability, error trends, performance signals, failed jobs, integrations, and post-deployment health.

• Recommend improvements to alert coverage, dashboard design, alert thresholds, noise reduction, and early-warning indicators based on recurring issues and operational trends.

• Support technical incident investigation by reviewing logs, traces, monitoring data, application behavior, database indicators, service errors, failed jobs, and integration failures.

• Partner with business support and QA resources to reproduce issues, validate defects, collect evidence, and produce concise technical investigation summaries for development, infrastructure, security, DevOps, and leadership review.

• Maintain and execute environment health validation checks for lower and production environments, including application availability, service readiness, configuration concerns, recurring failures, deployment validation signals, and operational readiness indicators.

• Develop and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, operational handoff notes, dashboard documentation, health-check procedures, and incident investigation playbooks for recurring issues.

• Identify repetitive operational, support, validation, monitoring, and environment tasks that can be automated through scripts, workflow tooling, dashboards, checklists, or standard operating procedures.

• Develop working knowledge of Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy, TFS workflows, GitHub repositories, deployment pipelines, and release automation processes to provide backup coverage and operational continuity when primary DevOps resources are unavailable.

• Assist with deployment execution support, deployment validation, pipeline monitoring, release readiness checks, and post-deployment verification during high-volume release periods or DevOps resource gaps.

• Support first-level troubleshooting for deployment failures, pipeline execution issues, Octopus deployment/package issues, environment readiness concerns, and source control integration issues; escalate complex engineering changes to the DevOps Engineer or DevOps Manager as appropriate.

• Maintain familiarity with core DevOps tooling documentation, deployment runbooks, pipeline support procedures, and release-support handoff processes to reduce single points of failure across the SPP technology organization.

• Support security and compliance follow-up by helping identify certificate concerns, vulnerability evidence, configuration issues, dependency concerns, recurring risks, and technical remediation needs.

• Track operational improvement opportunities and recommend practical changes that reduce reactive work, improve mean time to investigation, increase system visibility, and strengthen SPP operational maturity.

Minimum Years of Experience: 3+ years

Minimum of 3 years of experience in Technical Operations, Application Operations, DevOps, Production Support Engineering, or related field.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field, or equivalent professional experience.

• 3+ years of professional experience in Technical Operations, Application Operations, DevOps, Production Support Engineering, or related field.

• Hands-on experience supporting application health, operational monitoring, incident investigation, technical triage, and production or lower-environment troubleshooting.

• Experience with monitoring, alerting, logging, dashboards, and production troubleshooting using New Relic or similar observability tools.

• Ability to review alerts, failed jobs, integrations, error trends, and operational signals to identify issues and summarize follow-up actions.

• Working knowledge of CI/CD concepts, release automation, deployment validation, source control management, and software delivery lifecycle practices.

• Familiarity with Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy, TFS, GitHub, or similar software delivery and deployment platforms.

• Ability to investigate application issues by analyzing logs, traces, metrics, failed jobs, application behavior, database indicators, and service dependencies.

• Scripting and automation skills using PowerShell, Python, Shell, SQL, YAML, Power Automate, or similar technologies.

• Experience creating technical documentation, operational runbooks, troubleshooting guides, investigation summaries, dashboard documentation, deployment validation notes, health-check procedures, and support handoff notes.

• Problem-solving skills with the ability to address monitoring, application support, deployment validation, environment, operational readiness, and recurring issue patterns.

• Good written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain technical findings to cross-functional stakeholders.

• Ability to work independently, manage technical tasks across time zones, produce clear handoff documentation, and collaborate with GCC and CST-based teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with New Relic dashboard creation, alert tuning, service health reporting, recurring error trend analysis, post-deployment health checks, or production-readiness reporting.

• Experience supporting release validation, deployment monitoring, post-deployment verification, pipeline monitoring, or production readiness activities.

• Experience with Azure DevOps, Octopus Deploy, TFS, GitHub, Windows/IIS application hosting, SQL troubleshooting, enterprise application support, or similar operational environments.

• Experience building or improving a daily operations review model, system health scorecard, operational checklist, or proactive monitoring process.

• Exposure to DevSecOps or security operations support including certificate monitoring, vulnerability remediation tracking, dependency review, configuration risk tracking, or security scan follow-up.

• Experience supporting business-facing applications, incident evidence collection, application reproduction support, or collaboration with QA/manual testing resources.

• Exposure to workflow automation, Power Automate, infrastructure automation, configuration management, cloud operations, or automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Bicep, ARM templates, or similar technologies.

• Interest or experience with AI technologies to automate operational workflows, system management, documentation, monitoring analysis, incident investigation, and release-support tasks.