Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Playon is looking for an experienced Senior Site Reliability 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.

In this role, you can expect to:

• 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.

To thrive in this role, you have:

• 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.
• Familiarity with AI-augmented development tools (Claude, Codex) as part of a modern engineering workflow.

Nice to have:

• 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.

How you play:

Ownership over Participation: You take responsibility for holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, adapt quickly, and follow through against the toughest challenges.

Team over Stars: You are a bridge builder, rallying teams around common goals, finding win-win solutions, and helping others succeed.

Growth over Comfort: You actively seek to expand your comfort zone and skills, embracing new challenges and treating failure as a chance to learn.

Fairness over Popularity: You approach decisions with a scientist's mindset, stay objective, weigh long-term impact, and seek out other perspectives.

PlayOn is where high school sports come to life. Through GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps, we give every fan a front-row seat to the moments that matter most: the buzzer-beaters, the comeback wins, the senior nights, the rivalries that define a town.

We built our technology for the people who live and breathe high school athletics — the parents who never miss a game, the alumni still cheering from across the country, the communities that show up week after week. From buying tickets to watching a live stream to reliving the highlights, we make it simple to stay close to the sports and the athletes you love most.

Backed by KKR, we build the technology that powers high school athletics from the inside out: Schools trust us to handle ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, merchandise, and more so the people running programs can stay focused on the athletes and fans we all serve together.

We're a growth-stage company on a mission to make high school sports more accessible, more memorable, and more connected than ever before.

When being there means everything, we make sure you never miss a moment.

Why you'll love working at PlayOn

Product, potential, and people. We're a leader in the high school event space, constantly evolving our product to meet the needs of administrators. We focus on solving real challenges, learning quickly, and creating impactful solutions. This is a growth-stage company, meaning your contributions have real impact. You'll have opportunities to grow your skills, tackle meaningful problems, and make a difference in the lives of schools and the students and fans they serve. Our culture is built on accountability, collaboration, growth, and fairness. We don't just show up—we show up for each other. Everyone wears the same jersey, and we play hard, make the extra pass, and cheer one another on. Losses teach us, challenges motivate us, and persistence drives us forward. We value integrity over shortcuts, choosing to do what's right even when it's hard. Together, we strive to be better every day—because we know that's how we win as a team.

The benefits we offer

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 Note: Must be a full-time employee to participate in the company's employee health benefit plan. Part-time employees and interns are not eligible to participate