Staff Platform Engineer

About Blackhawk Network

Today, through BHN’s single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways. BHN’s network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at BHN.com.

 

Hybrid flexibility: At Blackhawk Network, you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds—focused remote work plus in-person collaboration on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, our regular in-office days at our Pleasanton headquarters. This rhythm gives you the tools, connection, and autonomy you need to make a real impact.

Overview

Today, through BHN's single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world's largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver theseproducts in seamless, integrated ways. BHN's network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints.

Responsibilities

Blackhawk Network is seeking an exceptional Staff Platform Engineer specializing in Observability to join our platform engineering team. This role combines deep technical expertise in modern observability tools and practices with strong enablement and advocacy skills. You will be the cornerstone of our observability platform, building world-class monitoring and observability solutions while serving as a trusted advisor and mentor to engineering teams across the organization.

As a Staff Platform Engineer focused on Observability, you will architect, configure, and maintain our enterprise observability stack while empowering teams to leverage these tools effectively. You will act as a developer advocate for the o11y domain, bridging the gap between complex observability technologies and engineeringteams through hands-on enablement, training, and collaboration. Your work will be essential in ensuring our payment systems maintain the highest standards of reliability, performance, and operational excellence.

 

Team Enablement & Developer Advocacy

• Serve as the primary observability advocate, educating and enabling engineering teams on best practices for instrumentation, monitoring, and troubleshooting• Design and deliver training programs, workshops, and hands-on sessions to upskill teams on modern observability practices• Partner with development teams to implement effective instrumentation strategies and improve system observability• Create comprehensive documentation, runbooks, and self-service guides that empower teams to leverage the observability platform independently• Act as a trusted technical advisor, working closely with teams to diagnose complex production issues and optimize application performance• Build and nurture a community of practice around observability, fostering knowledge sharing and continuous improvement

Technical Leadership & Innovation• Define and evolve observability standards, patterns, and best practices across the organization• Evaluate and integrate emerging observability tools and technologies to continuously improve our monitoring capabilities• Collaborate with SRE, DevOps, and development teams to ensure observability is embedded into the software development lifecycle• Drive initiatives to improve mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) through better observability practices• Mentor platform engineers and contribute to the growth of observability expertise within the organization

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, or related field (or equivalent experience)• 6+ years of hands-on experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or similar roles• Expert-level knowledge of modern observability tools including New Relic, Splunk, Coralogix, Datadog, or similar enterprise o11y platforms• Deep understanding of observability pipelines and data processing frameworks (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Fluentd, Vector, Logstash)• Proven experience configuring and optimizing modern observability stacks in productionenvironments at scale• Strong expertise in AWS cloud platforms and services, particularly CloudWatch, X-Ray, AWS Config, and CloudTrail• Demonstrated ability to enable and mentor teams through training, documentation, and hands-on guidance• Experience with infrastructure as code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation) for