Staff Cloud Engineer

PlayOn! Sports

6h•Hybrid

About The Position

PlayOn is looking for a Staff Cloud Engineer to own the technical direction of the AWS platform behind ticketing, streaming, and fundraising for high school sports across the country. Our workloads run on Amazon EKS and are provisioned through infrastructure as code, carrying the traffic patterns of live events: steady baseline punctuated by sharp, scheduled, and sometimes unpredictable spikes. You'll partner with product engineering, security, and finance to solve two problems. Engineering teams today can't see how much their applications cost to run in the cloud, and the distance between a merged pull request and a safe production deployment is longer than it needs to be. This is a hands-on staff-level role with no direct reports.

Requirements

7+ years of professional infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering experience, including time at a staff or equivalent senior individual-contributor level
Deep, production-grade experience operating Amazon EKS under real load, including cluster architecture, upgrades, autoscaling, multi-tenancy, and debugging failures in a running cluster
Expert-level Terraform experience, including module design and state management across many environments
Fluency with the CNCF ecosystem and the AWS Well-Architected Framework as working tools
Experience building cost and usage visibility that engineering teams actually used: dashboards, showback, or tooling that changed how teams made decisions
Experience planning and executing cloud modernization and migration work without a rewrite-everything approach
Proficiency in Go, Python, or TypeScript, enough to build real tooling rather than only glue scripts
Working knowledge of AWS core services, including EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, CloudFront, RDS, CloudWatch, and Cost Explorer
Experience driving technical change across teams you don't manage
Strong written communication; at this level, a well-argued design document is a primary deliverable

Nice To Haves

Experience with high-throughput video, streaming, or real-time media delivery, including CDN and edge architecture
Observability experience grounded in OpenTelemetry (we run New Relic)
Service mesh experience, Istio specifically
Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler, Graviton, and Spot
GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD, and progressive delivery frameworks
Experience as the first or most-senior infrastructure engineer on a team, establishing platform practice close to a blank slate
Knowledge of or interest in sports, sports management, and statistics

Responsibilities

Build the reporting and tooling that surfaces cloud spend by domain, team, and project, and put it where engineers will actually see it
Own our Kubernetes platform on EKS: cluster architecture, upgrade strategy, multi-tenancy, networking, and workload isolation
Design and maintain Terraform modules and reusable patterns that let product teams provision infrastructure safely without waiting on a ticket
Standardize CI/CD across services with progressive delivery, automated rollback, and deployment practices that make production changes routine rather than eventful
Plan and execute modernization and migration work, moving legacy workloads to containers and self-managed services to managed ones, incrementally rather than all at once
Harden the platform alongside security: IAM boundaries, secrets management, network policy, image provenance, and audit posture
Participate in on-call for platform services and lead incident response when infrastructure is implicated
Raise the technical bar through design review, code review, and mentorship of senior engineers