Staff Engineer - Observability & Performance

Fastly•Denver, CO

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

We’re seeking a versatile and experienced Engineer who thrives in a fast paced, high scale environment and is passionate about reliability, performance, automation, and tooling. Reporting to the VP of Performance Center Operations, you’ll serve as a key individual contributor within the Performance Center Operations team. The Fastly Performance Center is the strategic and operational engine that ensures the highest level of performance for the most demanding workloads on the Internet. We proactively safeguard quality of service at the global scale, drive technical and product strategies that shape our platform’s evolution, and directly influence revenue outcomes by ensuring our customers succeed. Partnering cross-functionally across Engineering, Infrastructure, Product, Revenue, and Account teams to build tooling and processes that drive scale, availability, and intelligent automation. Your work will help ensure Fastly remains the most performant, trusted, and customer aligned partner in the industry. The scope of this role will evolve with the needs of the business and the maturity of the program. Additional responsibilities may be assigned based on individual expertise and strategic priorities from the Office of the Founder & CTO. This role is approximately 50% Cross-functional Operations, 40% Data Analysis / Traffic Insights, and 10% Site Reliability Engineering, balancing technical expertise with collaboration and strategic impact.

Requirements

8+ years of progressive technical experience in Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Streaming Media, Security, or other high-volume internet traffic environments.
Deep understanding of network/distributed/cloud systems: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS, caching/proxy/CDN technologies; direct experience in CDN, Web Application and API Security a plus
Demonstrated ability to build automation, tooling, and observability systems: e.g., dashboards, alerts, instrumentation, data pipelines. Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, BigQuery/SQL, etc
Hands-on experience with scripting or programming (e.g., Python, Go, Shell) and comfortable building tooling rather than just consuming.
Experience working cross-functionally with engineering, infrastructure, operations, analytics, and customer/account teams. Strong communication skills, ability to translate technical findings to non-technical stakeholders.
Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex technical work across multiple teams, facilitate daily standups or working sessions, and maintain operational momentum in complex, fast-moving environments.
Proven track record of driving mission-critical reliability and performance improvements in production systems. Strong sense of ownership and accountability
Experience with monitoring/alerting systems and incident response. Bonus for experience with live streaming, high-variability traffic, or global seasonality at scale.

Nice To Haves

Experience with large-scale data analytics systems (BigQuery, Spark, Presto) to derive operational insights from traffic telemetry
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), infrastructure as code, or container orchestration (Terraform, Kubernetes)
Experience evaluating build‐vs‐buy decisions and driving platform wide tooling improvements
Background in media, live events, or streaming operations in a high throughput, latency sensitive environment a plus

Responsibilities

Drive the development of automation and observability tooling that improves operational efficiency and platform reliability, including traffic monitoring, alerting, and surveillance tools.
Partner with observability teams to implement and improve existing dashboards (Grafana, Prometheus) and metrics pipelines that provide meaningful visibility into traffic patterns, surges, and seasonal trends.
Help define SLIs/SLOs, and improve monitoring frameworks, ensuring alerts and dashboards reflect operational reality and proactively surface issues before customer impact.
Collaborate with data/analytics teams to leverage data pipelines (e.g., SQL, BigQuery or other large-scale data stores) for trend analysis, capacity planning, traffic pattern recognition
Step in to run daily operational standups or coordination meetings as needed. Ensuring priorities are clear, follow ups are tracked, and cross functional execution maintains momentum.
Facilitate cross-team communication during high-impact initiatives or incident reviews, surfacing blockers early and maintaining execution momentum
Assist in root-cause investigations of performance, scalability or traffic anomalies, translate learnings into improvements in tooling and architecture
Act as a technical liaison, helping contextualize traffic behavior, system performance, and support escalations with clear insight
Help define and evolve run-books, incident response processes, post-mortems, knowledge base, ensuring that repeated issues are proactively surfaced and addressed via automation or tooling rather than reactive firefighting
Monitor seasonal patterns, major events, and global traffic distribution, helping ensure the platform remains resilient during shifts in demand

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance.
Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees.
We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
For 2026, we offer 12 paid local holidays, 12 paid company wellness days.

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