Staff Observability Engineer

About the role

Our roster has an opening with your name on it
FanDuel is looking for a Staff Observability Engineer to design, build, and mature the observability ecosystem that underpins our platform and services. You will deliver deep visibility into system behavior by combining system telemetry with user signals to provide a holistic view of performance, reliability, and user experience. You’ll also explore how AI and machine learning can enhance observability, from intelligent alerting and anomaly detection to accelerating root cause analysis.

Responsibilities

• Contribute in defining and driving the observability strategy and roadmap across multiple teams, aligning with business priorities and engineering goals.
• Design and improve scalable observability capabilities that provide actionable insights into system health, performance, and user experience.
• Establish and standardize best practices for monitoring, alerting, incident management, and postmortems across the organization.
• Drive operational excellence by evolving incident management, on-call practices, and post-incident learning, ensuring systemic improvements over local fixes.
• Lead cross-team initiatives to improve end-to-end reliability, identifying systemic risks and driving their resolution.
• Leverage automation and AI-assisted workflows to accelerate root cause analysis and reduce operational toil at scale.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to translate observability insights into strategic roadmap decisions.
• Identify trends across system and user signals to proactively detect, prevent, and mitigate large-scale issues.
• Optimize observability platforms for cost, scalability, and long-term sustainability.
• Mentor engineers and raise the reliability and observability maturity across the organization.

Requirements

• Significant hands-on experience in observability engineering, SRE, platform engineering, or related roles, with a track record of driving impact beyond individual teams.
• Strong expertise in monitoring and observability, with significant hands-on experience in Datadog.
• Experience defining and driving observability or reliability strategy across teams or domains.
• Proficiency with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform).
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and decision-making across multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems principles (e.g. consistency, availability, partition tolerance) and their real-world trade-offs.
• Experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and alerting strategies, including user-centric and business-aligned metrics.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g. Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript), and the ability to design scalable systems, build tooling and automation, and operate effectively within large, complex codebases.
• Experience driving large-scale improvements through automation, reducing organizational toil, and eliminating classes of recurring issues.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to translate technical signals into business and customer impact.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A mindset of ownership, with a focus on long-term impact, scalability, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience in observability engineering, SRE, platform engineering, or related roles, with a track record of driving impact beyond individual teams.
• Strong expertise in monitoring and observability, with significant hands-on experience in Datadog.
• Experience defining and driving observability or reliability strategy across teams or domains.
• Proficiency with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform).
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and decision-making across multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems principles (e.g. consistency, availability, partition tolerance) and their real-world trade-offs.
• Experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and alerting strategies, including user-centric and business-aligned metrics.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g. Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript), and the ability to design scalable systems, build tooling and automation, and operate effectively within large, complex codebases.
• Experience driving large-scale improvements through automation, reducing organizational toil, and eliminating classes of recurring issues.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to translate technical signals into business and customer impact.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A mindset of ownership, with a focus on long-term impact, scalability, and continuous improvement.

Skills

• Significant hands-on experience in observability engineering, SRE, platform engineering, or related roles, with a track record of driving impact beyond individual teams.
• Strong expertise in monitoring and observability, with significant hands-on experience in Datadog.
• Experience defining and driving observability or reliability strategy across teams or domains.
• Proficiency with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (AWS), and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform).
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and decision-making across multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems principles (e.g. consistency, availability, partition tolerance) and their real-world trade-offs.
• Experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and alerting strategies, including user-centric and business-aligned metrics.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g. Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript), and the ability to design scalable systems, build tooling and automation, and operate effectively within large, complex codebases.
• Experience driving large-scale improvements through automation, reducing organizational toil, and eliminating classes of recurring issues.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to translate technical signals into business and customer impact.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A mindset of ownership, with a focus on long-term impact, scalability, and continuous improvement.

Benefits

• We offer amazing benefits above and beyond the basics. We have an array of health plans to choose from (some as low as $0 per paycheck) that include programs for fertility and family planning, mental health support, and fitness benefits.
• We offer generous paid time off (PTO & sick leave), annual bonus and long-term incentive opportunities (based on performance), 401k with up to a 5% match, commuter benefits , pet insurance, and more - check out all our benefits here: FanDuel Total Rewards.
• The applicable salary range for this position is $170,000 - $213,000 USD, which is dependent on a variety of factors including relevant experience, location, business needs and market demand.
• This role may offer the following benefits: medical, vision, and dental insurance; life insurance; disability insurance; a 401(k) matching program; among other employee benefits.
• This role may also be eligible for short-term or long-term incentive compensation, including, but not limited to, cash bonuses and stock program participation.
• This role includes paid personal time off and 14 paid company holidays.
• FanDuel offers paid sick time in accordance with all applicable state and federal laws.

Pay

The applicable salary range for this position is $170,000 - $213,000 USD, which is dependent on a variety of factors including relevant experience, location, business needs and market demand.

Schedule

This role may offer the following benefits: medical, vision, and dental insurance; life insurance; disability insurance; a 401(k) matching program; among other employee benefits.