Operations Engineer
Xsolla is a video game commerce company that provides a suite of tools and services—including merchant of record payment processing, tax management, fraud prevention, compliance, refunds, dispute management, and end-user support—to help game developers and publishers launch, grow, and monetize their games globally. It serves video game developers, publishers, and studios of all sizes across global and regional markets.
About Xsolla
Xsolla connects the tools, systems, payments, and web shops used by the video games industry, positioning itself as a global merchant of record supporting over 1,000 payment methods and a cumulative audience of 50 million, with transaction fees around 5%. Its services include tax management, fraud monitoring and prevention, global and regional regulatory compliance, refund and dispute management, and end-user payment support. Xsolla's product lineup includes the Xsolla SDK for native in-app payments on side-loaded apps and alternative app stores, a Buy Button enabling link-out purchases from iOS mobile games in the U.S., and Web Shop for building customized, direct-to-consumer game storefronts. The company works with major gaming industry partners and clients such as Mytona, Ubisoft, MARVEL SNAP, and others, and highlights partner success stories, industry events, and its own culture and hiring initiatives on its site.
Skills
About the Role
You will serve as the primary dashboard monitor during your shift, continuously watching the GTO Operational Dashboard in Datadog, detecting anomalies, and deciding whether alerts warrant an incident ticket. You will triage and investigate production incidents, create tickets, perform initial technical investigations, and route issues to the right team. You will own lower-severity incidents end-to-end, diagnosing and resolving them using runbook procedures, escalating when necessary. During major incidents, you will support the TSO Lead as the technical right hand in the war room, surfacing real-time data and maintaining live incident timelines. You will draft incident communications, including Slack updates, stakeholder notifications, and customer-facing status page updates. During non-incident periods, you will analyze incident trends and recurring issues, compiling data into reports for product and engineering teams. You will compile incident timelines, draft Post-Incident Review documents, and track action items. You will build and maintain operational automation and contribute to runbook development. You will conduct structured shift handoffs and participate in knowledge transfer sessions with SREs. You will occasionally cover for the TSO Lead during absences, including severity classification and escalation decisions, and publish periodic health reports of critical apps.
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, production operations, NOC, or technical operations in a high-availability environment
- Strong troubleshooting and investigation skills across application logs, APM traces, infrastructure metrics, database queries, and network paths
- Hands-on experience with Datadog or equivalent observability platform such as Grafana, Splunk, New Relic, or Elastic
- Proficiency in at least one scripting language: Python, Go, or Bash
- Clear written and verbal communication skills in English
- Working knowledge of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure acceptable)
- Understanding of SLOs, error budgets, and burn-rate alerting
- Experience with incident management tooling: JIRA or JIRA Service Management, PagerDuty or OpsGenie, Slack, and Confluence
- Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML-assisted operations
- Comfort with 24x7 shift-based operations and rotating weekend on-call
Responsibilities
- Serve as the primary dashboard monitor during your shift, watching the GTO Operational Dashboard in Datadog
- Detect anomalies by correlating signals across APM, logs, metrics, synthetic tests, and Real User Monitoring
- Triage and investigate production incidents and create incident tickets in JIRA Service Management
- Perform initial technical investigation using Datadog and determine blast radius and root cause domain
- Route incidents to the correct team using the smart routing model
- Own lower-severity incidents end-to-end from detection through resolution
- Execute runbook procedures and escalate when thresholds are exceeded
- Support the TSO Lead during major incidents as technical right hand in the war room
- Maintain the incident ticket with live timeline entries and linked evidence
- Execute mitigation actions as directed
- Draft incident communications including Slack updates, stakeholder notifications, and status page updates
- Analyze incident trends, recurring issues, and production bugs during non-incident periods
- Compile data from Datadog, JIRA, and Slack and identify patterns
- Contribute findings to regular reports for product and engineering teams
- Compile incident timelines and draft initial PIR documents
- Track PIR action items and flag overdue items to the TSO Lead
- Build and maintain operational automation such as alert enrichment scripts, incident templates, Slack workflows, and dashboard widgets
- Contribute to runbook development and document resolution procedures
- Conduct structured shift handoffs covering active incidents, at-risk services, and upcoming deployments
- Participate in knowledge transfer sessions with SREs
- Cover for the TSO Lead during vacations, absences, or emergencies
- Publish health reports of critical apps periodically