Staff DevOps Engineer

Fliff unpacks sports gaming into social, free-to-play games for all types of sports fans. We've built a social sports gaming experience that allows users to compete for leaderboard positioning, to achieve badges and build their status within the game.
We are pioneering play-for-fun sports gaming, with our flagship social sportsbook experience that includes sweepstakes promotions and loyalty rewards. We provide sports fans with fun, engaging, and free-to-play alternatives to real money gaming.
Who We’re Looking ForFliff is looking for a Staff DevOps Engineer who is passionate about building scalable, reliable, and secure platforms that power real-time, high-traffic user experiences. You thrive in a fast-paced environment, excel at solving complex distributed systems problems, and enjoy partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Security teams. You bring a platform mindset, an automation-first philosophy, and the ability to drive architectural decisions that improve engineering velocity and system reliability.

What You’ll Do

• Architect, build, and operate highly available, high-performance infrastructure that supports large volumes of real-time traffic, especially during peak sports windows.
• Lead the design and development of internal platforms, tooling, and automated workflows that accelerate engineering productivity.
• Own and improve observability (metrics, logs, traces), monitoring, and alerting to ensure fast detection and resolution of issues.
• Drive incident response, root-cause analysis, and reliability improvements across the engineering organization.
• Enhance and maintain our Kubernetes-based platform, including Helm charts, multi-environment pipelines, cluster upgrades, and operational hardening.
• Implement and evolve security best practices around IAM, network architecture, secrets management, and infrastructure governance.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support safe, rapid, and stable deployments.
• Partner with engineering leadership on capacity planning, cost optimization, and infrastructure roadmap planning.
• Mentor and guide engineers across teams, influencing architectural direction and DevOps best practices.
• Champion Infrastructure-as-Code, GitOps workflows, and automation as the default mode of operating.

Required Skills & Experience

• 7+ years of SRE/DevOps/Cloud Infrastructure experience supporting production systems at scale.
• Proven experience running distributed systems and microservices in high-traffic or high-availability environments.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, Helm, and cloud-native architecture (preferably AWS).
• Strong proficiency in Go or another backend programming language.
• Exposure to PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, or Cassandra performance tuning in a production environment.
• Deep familiarity with event-driven systems, streaming pipelines, or messaging platforms such as Kinesis, Kafka, Pub/Sub, or RabbitMQ.
• Advanced hands-on experience with Terraform or a comparable IaC solution.
• Strong practical understanding of observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, etc.).
• Experience implementing SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and reliability-driven engineering practices.
• Expertise with CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.
• Solid foundation in security fundamentals: IAM, network policies, workload hardening, secrets management.
• Demonstrated leadership in technical decision-making, cross-functional influence, and on-call/incident management.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively across product, engineering, and leadership teams.
• Ability to influence org-wide DevOps maturity, champion best practices, and drive standards across multiple teams.

Nice to Have:

• Background in infrastructure cost modeling and optimization, particularly in high-scale microservices environments.
• Experience running workloads requiring low latency or real-time processing (gaming, sports, fintech, ad tech, streaming).
• Prior involvement in PCI, SOC2, GDPR, or similar compliance initiatives.
• Experience mentoring or guiding cross-functional engineering groups (backend teams, mobile teams, data teams).

Benefits:

• The annual salary for this role ranges from $180,000 to $220,000, depending on experience and background.
• Unlimited/ Flexible Time Off: Flexible vacation policy
• Health benefits with 100% paid premiums* for medical, dental, and vision plans for employees and dependents, plus an on-demand healthcare concierge.
• Pre-tax savings plans for healthcare, with up to a $500 annual employer contribution to the HSA (if enrolled in the HSA medical plan).
• Employee-sponsored 401(k) to help reach your financial goals.
• Fully remote