Staff Engineer - Observability & Performance

What You'll Do

:

• This role is approximately 50% Cross-functional Operations, 40% Data Analysis / Traffic Insights, and 10% Site Reliability Engineering, balancing technical expertise with collaboration and strategic impact.
• Drive the development of automation and observability tooling that improves operational efficiency and platform reliability, including traffic monitoring, alerting, and surveillance tools.
• Partner with observability teams to implement and improve existing dashboards (Grafana, Prometheus) and metrics pipelines that provide meaningful visibility into traffic patterns, surges, and seasonal trends.
• Help define SLIs/SLOs, and improve monitoring frameworks, ensuring alerts and dashboards reflect operational reality and proactively surface issues before customer impact.
• Collaborate with data/analytics teams to leverage data pipelines (e.g., SQL, BigQuery or other large-scale data stores) for trend analysis, capacity planning, traffic pattern recognition
• Step in to run daily operational standups or coordination meetings as needed. Ensuring priorities are clear, follow ups are tracked, and cross functional execution maintains momentum.
• Facilitate cross-team communication during high-impact initiatives or incident reviews, surfacing blockers early and maintaining execution momentum
• Assist in root-cause investigations of performance, scalability or traffic anomalies, translate learnings into improvements in tooling and architecture
• Act as a technical liaison, helping contextualize traffic behavior, system performance, and support escalations with clear insight
• Help define and evolve run-books, incident response processes, post-mortems, knowledge base, ensuring that repeated issues are proactively surfaced and addressed via automation or tooling rather than reactive firefighting
• Monitor seasonal patterns, major events, and global traffic distribution, helping ensure the platform remains resilient during shifts in demand

What We're Looking For:

• 8+ years of progressive technical experience in Content Delivery Networks (CDN), Streaming Media, Security, or other high-volume internet traffic environments.
• Deep understanding of network/distributed/cloud systems: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, TLS, caching/proxy/CDN technologies; direct experience in CDN, Web Application and API Security a plus
• Demonstrated ability to build automation, tooling, and observability systems: e.g., dashboards, alerts, instrumentation, data pipelines. Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, BigQuery/SQL, etc
• Hands-on experience with scripting or programming (e.g., Python, Go, Shell) and comfortable building tooling rather than just consuming.
• Experience working cross-functionally with engineering, infrastructure, operations, analytics, and customer/account teams. Strong communication skills, ability to translate technical findings to non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to coordinate complex technical work across multiple teams, facilitate daily standups or working sessions, and maintain operational momentum in complex, fast-moving environments.
• Proven track record of driving mission-critical reliability and performance improvements in production systems. Strong sense of ownership and accountability
• Experience with monitoring/alerting systems and incident response. Bonus for experience with live streaming, high-variability traffic, or global seasonality at scale.

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

• Experience with large-scale data analytics systems (BigQuery, Spark, Presto) to derive operational insights from traffic telemetry
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), infrastructure as code, or container orchestration (Terraform, Kubernetes)
• Experience evaluating build‐vs‐buy decisions and driving platform wide tooling improvements
• Background in media, live events, or streaming operations in a high throughput, latency sensitive environment a plus

Work Hours:

This position will require you to be available during core business hours and occasional nights and weekends as required for on call and incident response

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements:

The preferred locations for this position are:

• San Francisco, CA
• New York, NY
• Denver, CO

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home.

There is a strong preference for Hybrid near a local office. However, we may be willing to consider exceptionally qualified remote candidates within the US.

This position will require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager.

SF / LA Fair Chance Ordinance Statement

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Salary

The estimated salary range for this position is $195,720 to $234,864. Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly’s equity and discretionary bonus programs.

Benefits

We care about you. Fastly works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your employment with Fastly. Curious about our offerings?

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance. Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees. We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program. For 2026, we offer 12 paid local holidays, 12 paid company wellness days.