Staff Cloud Engineer

Staff Cloud Engineer

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.

The outcomes you'll deliver

• Give every engineering team clear visibility into what their applications cost to run in the cloud, so they can make informed decisions that lower spend
• Reduce cost to serve across our AWS footprint without sacrificing reliability during live events
• Shorten the path from merged pull request to safe production deployment
• Make environment provisioning self-service so product teams stop waiting on tickets
• Set multi-quarter technical direction for cloud infrastructure, documented well enough to outlast any single person

In this role, you can expect to

• 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

To thrive in this role, you have

• 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

You Might Also Have

• 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

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.

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