Operational Support Engineer

Role Summary

The team is responsible for the stability, availability, and operational excellence of our 24/7 live video streaming, ads, player, and real-time delivery platforms. As an Operational Support Engineer (L2), you take end-to-end ownership of customer-impacting production incidents once they are triaged by Level 1 support. You operate directly on production systems, lead live incident resolution, and act as the operational bridge between Support, Engineering, DevOps, and customers, particularly during high-impact live events. This is a hands-on, customer-facing role focused on incident ownership, production operations, automation, and operational scalability, not just reactive troubleshooting.

Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership of escalated customer issues from Level 1 Support and drive them to resolution.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex, high-impact production incidents affecting live streams, VOD playback, ad insertion, DRM, and real-time WebRTC services.
• Operate directly on production environments, including configuration changes, CDN adjustments, and corrective actions, following established operational procedures, including executing mitigations and emergency changes during live incidents when customer impact requires immediate action.
• Lead or actively contribute to live incident bridges involving customers, internal teams, and partners.
• Provide clear, timely communication during incidents, including status updates and customer-facing explanations.
• Leverage AI tools and automation to enhance operational efficiency and incident response.
• Participate in pre-event readiness planning for critical customer events.
• Respond to critical alerts within defined SLAs for stream health, player errors, and delivery infrastructure.
• Conduct or contribute to root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Product teams to eliminate recurring issues permanently.
• Provide feedback on system observability, tooling gaps, and operational risks.

Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of relevant experience in operational, support, or similar customer-facing roles.
• Proven ability to own complex problems end-to-end and operate with a high degree of autonomy.
• Strong experience supporting production video streaming platforms, OTT services, and live systems.
• Solid troubleshooting skills across distributed systems (APIs, microservices, cloud infrastructure).
• Familiarity with HLS, DASH, CMAF, WebRTC, DRM, and CDN architectures.
• Experience working with monitoring, alerting, and logs to diagnose live incidents (Grafana, Kibana/ELK, Prometheus, Loki).
• Correlate backend streaming metrics, player telemetry, and CDN signals to diagnose live customer issues end-to-end.
• Comfort performing controlled changes in production environments.
• Working knowledge of incident management and on-call operations.
• Operational Mindset: Proven ability to remain calm, structured, and decisive during high-pressure incidents. Strong sense of ownership and accountability for customer outcomes. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including customer-facing communication during incidents.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare coverage (medical, dental, and vision plans)
• Supplemental coverage (accident insurance, critical illness insurance and hospital indemnity)
• 401(k)-retirement savings
• Life & disability insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• Legal support
• Auto, home insurance
• Pet insurance
• Employee discounts with preferred vendors

Equal Employment Opportunity

Russell Tobin is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of the race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, reproductive health decision making, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.

Fair Chance Employment

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants and employees with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, or to perform the essential functions of this role, please contact us.

Accommodations

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants and employees with disabilities. If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the application or interview process, or to perform the essential functions of this role, please contact us.