Production Support Engineer

• 3 to 5 years hands on application production support
• Strong Autosys
• Strong Unix and Shell scripting
• Working SQL, Oracle, Hadoop or similar DBMS
• Ability to juggle and prioritize multiple concurrent issues
• Fast independent learner

Required, confirmed from team member

• Command level Unix fluency, not tool familiarity. Interviewers ask for the actual syntax: du and df for disk space, top and uptime for system load, find with -type and -mtime flags for locating files by age. A candidate who can describe what a command does but can’t produce the flags will get caught here.
• Ability to distinguish failure types precisely. Interviewers specifically probe whether a candidate conflates a data issue with a Unix file system issue with a database connection pool issue. These are three different diagnostic paths and the interviewer will correct and re-ask if a candidate blurs them.
• SQL depth beyond basic querying: index behavior and why a query runs slow, truncate versus delete, join types used in production troubleshooting, not just writing selects.
• Autosys job state knowledge beyond scheduling, specifically the difference between a job marked inactive versus on hold versus on ice, and why a team would use each.
• Splunk and Dynatrace used together, and candidates should be able to explain why a team runs both rather than just one. Splunk gets tested as a log search and correlation tool, not described as monitoring.
• Noisy alert management. Interviewers ask how a candidate would handle an alert threshold that’s firing too often, for example tuning a CPU alert from 70 percent to 85 percent to cut false positives.
• Incident severity fluency: candidates should be able to define P1 through P4 without hesitation and describe how communication changes at each level, including whether they’d post to a status page versus direct email during an outage.
• Basic API and auth troubleshooting exposure, specifically JWT or token related login failures, came up as a possible scenario topic.
• Shell scripting for automation of repetitive work, for example disk cleanup or log rotation scripts, should be a real example the candidate has done, not something on the resume without a story behind it.