Senior Software Engineer, Observability

PlayOn • Alpharetta, GA

41d • Hybrid

About The Position

Playon is looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help us strengthen the reliability, performance, and scalability of our systems. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering and operations — focused on building the tools, automation, and visibility that enable our teams to deliver resilient software at scale. You’ll work closely with application engineers, DevOps, and QA teams to evolve our infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, observability frameworks, and reliability practices. This is a hands-on engineering role with a strong emphasis on automation, performance analysis, and continuous improvement. The Outcomes You’ll Deliver: In the first few months, You'll focus on building a clear understanding of our systems and establishing the foundation for stronger observability across our platforms. As you settle in, your scope will grow to include broader reliability and performance initiatives. • Assess and improve visibility: Work with engineering teams to review our current dashboards, metrics, and logs, identify the biggest gaps, and make targeted improvements that help us better understand system health. • Tighten monitoring and alerting: Refine alerts and dashboards for the most critical services so we can catch issues earlier and respond faster. • Build observability into delivery: Add instrumentation and telemetry into existing build and deploy processes to make reliability checks part of our normal release workflow. • Clarify what "reliable" means: Help define initial SLIs and SLOs for a few core user flows, aligning the team on what good performance and availability look like. • Streamline incident response: Partner with the Event Commander/on-call rotation to improve how we communicate, coordinate, and follow up during incidents. • Reduce manual effort: Automate routine checks and monitoring tasks to free up engineers for more impactful work. Over time, you'll take on a larger role shaping how we measure, monitor, and improve reliability across all services — setting standards, mentoring others, and helping engineering teams make data-driven decisions about performance and stability.

Requirements

• Solid experience in Python, especially for automation, tooling, and data-driven operational tasks.
• Proficiency in at least one (Java, C++, or Go).
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and modern deployment practices (Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, version control, and automated testing frameworks.
• Experience with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, etc.) and log/metric analysis for diagnosing issues.
• Proven experience facilitating and documenting Critical User Journeys translating them to actionable SLA/SLO for automation.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams and communicate clearly in high-impact situations.
• A problem-solver who approaches reliability as a shared responsibility across engineering.

Nice To Haves

• Experience writing or maintaining end-to-end or integration tests for distributed systems.
• Background in performance testing, capacity planning, or chaos engineering.
• Contributions to internal developer tooling or reliability-focused frameworks.
• Exposure to security, compliance, or change management processes in production environments.
• Relevant certifications.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to system observability i.e implementing, improving metrics, alerting, and dashboards for better insight and faster recovery.
• Develop automation, tooling, and monitoring solutions to support high service availability.
• Partner with application and quality engineering teams to implement best practices in reliability, release automation, and testing.
• Drive operational excellence through proactive incident prevention, blameless postmortems, and capacity planning.
• Participate in on-call rotations to support critical services and ensure rapid response to incidents.

Benefits

• Multiple medical insurance plans to choose from
• Dental, vision life and disability insurance
• Employee Emergency Fund
• Company equity (stock options)
• Open PTO policy
• 401K plan with company match
• Hybrid/flexible work environment

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed