What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Software Engineer, Observability position at PlayOn Sports?
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.
PlayOn is a dynamic growth-stage company dedicated to championing the spirit of play in the high school space. Backed by KKR, our family of brands—including GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps—empowers schools with innovative solutions and exceptional service. Our fan engagement platform is the only one that offers event ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, merchandise sales, and website management in one place. We save administrators time so they can focus on what truly matters: supporting the students, staff, and fans who bring their programs to life.
Trusted by thousands of schools across the country, we're here to help create more instant replays, hold-your-breath moments, last-minute comebacks, and games you want to watch over and over again.
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.
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Ownership over Participation- You take responsibility for achieving holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, and adapt quickly when situations require a different approach. You follow through even against the toughest challenges.
- Team over Stars- You are a bridge builder, establishing processes and relationships with teams outside your own. You work to rally around common goals, find win-win solutions, compromise when necessary, and help others succeed.
- Growth over Comfort- You are driven by a desire to grow and actively seek opportunities to expand your comfort zone, skills, and confidence. You embrace new challenges with curiosity, accepting discomfort and failure as opportunities to learn.
- Fairness over Popularity- You approach decisions with a scientist’s mindset, challenging your assumptions and remaining objective. You consider long-term impact rather than relying on short-term gains, proactively seek others’ perspectives, and manage emotions in decision-making.
PlayOn is a dynamic growth-stage company dedicated to championing the spirit of play in the high school space. Backed by KKR, our family of brands—including GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps—empowers schools with innovative solutions and exceptional service. Our fan engagement platform is the only one that offers event ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, merchandise sales, and website management in one place. We save administrators time so they can focus on what truly matters: supporting the students, staff, and fans who bring their programs to life.
Trusted by thousands of schools across the country, we're here to help create more instant replays, hold-your-breath moments, last-minute comebacks, and games you want to watch over and over again.
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.