Serve as the primary dashboard monitor during your shift — continuously watch the GTO Operational Dashboard in Datadog, detect anomalies by correlating signals across APM, logs, metrics, synthetic tests, and Real User Monitoring, and determine whether alerts warrant an incident ticket or can be resolved through immediate investigation.

Triage and investigate production incidents — create incident tickets in JIRA Service Management, perform initial technical investigation using Datadog (traces, logs, infrastructure and application metrics), determine blast radius and likely root cause domain, and route to the correct team (Product SRE, Infrastructure SRE, or Engineering) using the smart routing model.

Own lower-severity incidents end-to-end from detection through resolution — diagnose, execute runbook procedures, and resolve without escalation where possible. Escalate promptly when an incident is unresolved within defined thresholds or requires a code-level fix.

Support the TSO Lead during major incidents as the technical right hand in the war room — surface real-time data (error rates, impact scope, deployment history, related alerts), maintain the incident ticket with live timeline entries and linked evidence, and execute mitigation actions as directed.

Draft incident communications under TSO Lead direction, including internal Slack updates, stakeholder notifications, and customer-facing status page updates (status.xsolla.com). Support clear, timely communication throughout the incident lifecycle.

During non-incident periods, analyze incident trends, recurring issues, and production bugs — compile data from Datadog, JIRA, and Slack, identify patterns, and contribute findings to regular reports for product and engineering teams.

Compile incident timelines and draft initial PIR documents for Post-Incident Review preparation. Track PIR action items post-session and flag overdue items to the TSO Lead.

Build and maintain operational automation (alert enrichment scripts, incident templates, Slack workflows, dashboard widgets) and contribute to runbook development — documenting new resolution procedures so they can be repeated by any Operations Engineer on any shift.

Conduct structured shift handoffs covering active incidents, at-risk services, upcoming deployments, and follow-up items. Participate in knowledge transfer sessions with SREs to continuously expand independent resolution capability.

Cover for the TSO Lead during vacations, absences, or emergencies — including severity classification, escalation decisions, stakeholder communications, and basic Incident Commander functions.

Publish health reports of critical apps periodically.

4+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, production operations, NOC, or technical operations in a high-availability environment. Experience with platforms that handle payments, e-commerce, SaaS, or gaming workloads is preferred.

Strong troubleshooting and investigation skills — ability to take an alert or user-reported symptom and methodically trace it through the stack: application logs, APM traces, infrastructure metrics, database queries, and network paths.

Hands-on experience with Datadog (or equivalent observability platform: Grafana, Splunk, New Relic, Elastic) — navigating APM, building log queries, reading infrastructure dashboards, interpreting SLO burn rates, and configuring monitors and alerts.

Proficiency in at least one scripting language: Python, Go, or Bash. You will write automation scripts, build operational tooling, and work with APIs.

Clear written and verbal communication skills in English — ability to write incident tickets, investigation notes, Slack updates, shift handoff reports, status page communications, and PIR drafts that are clear, concise, and useful to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Working knowledge of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure acceptable) — understanding of pods, deployments, services, ingress, node health, and how to investigate Kubernetes-related production issues.

Understanding of SLOs, error budgets, and burn-rate alerting — knowing what a multi-window burn-rate alert means, how error budgets deplete, and how SLO breaches translate into incident severity.

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: anomaly detection, alert correlation, predictive monitoring, or automated remediation.

Comfort with 24x7 shift-based operations as part of a follow-the-sun model with handoff overlaps. Weekend on-call (rotating) is required.

Experience in the gaming, payments, or fintech industry — particularly environments where transaction processing, checkout flows, or player-facing services must meet strict uptime requirements.

Familiarity with Datadog Service Catalog, synthetic monitoring, and RUM; exposure to database operations (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka); and experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment tooling (GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Helm).

JIRA Service Management administration experience (workflows, automation rules, SLA timers) or ITIL Foundation certification — practical experience matters more than credentials.

Serve as Incident Commander for major incidents — coordinating cross-functional response teams, driving investigation, making escalation decisions, and ensuring incidents are resolved within SLA targets.

Own all incident communications: draft and send clear, timely updates to senior leadership, Customer Success, and partner/customer contacts throughout the incident lifecycle, and manage customer-facing status page updates (status.xsolla.com).

Facilitate blameless Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) for major incidents — leading root cause identification, assigning corrective actions with clear owners and deadlines, and tracking them to closure.

During non-incident periods, proactively analyze incident trends, recurring issues, and production bugs — identify patterns, create Problem tickets, and report findings and recommendations to product and engineering teams on a regular cadence.

Enforce the incident management framework across the organization, including the severity model, priority matrix, SLA targets, escalation procedures, and deployment readiness gates.

Oversee and mentor the Operations Engineer on your shift — coaching on triage, investigation, runbook execution, and documentation quality while conducting regular knowledge transfer sessions to build depth across the service portfolio.

Produce shift handoff reports and deliver regular operational reporting: incident trends, KPI performance (MTTD, MTTA, MTTR), SLA adherence, proactive detection rate, and repeat incident analysis.

Audit service catalogue completeness on a regular cadence and govern JIRA Service Management workflows for incident, PIR, and problem management.

Cover for the Operations Engineer role during vacations, absences, breaks, or surge incidents — including monitoring, triage, ticket creation, and runbook execution. Participate in weekend on-call rotation for major incidents.

6+ years of experience in incident management, SRE, NOC leadership, or technical operations in a production environment supporting high-availability, high-transaction systems (payments, e-commerce, SaaS, or gaming platforms preferred).

Proven incident management experience — coordinating multi-team response, making real-time escalation decisions, and communicating with executive stakeholders under pressure.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English — ability to draft clear, concise executive updates at 3 AM under pressure, facilitate blameless PIRs, present operational metrics to senior leadership, and communicate incident status to customers and partners with clarity and professionalism.

Strong ITIL foundation — understanding of incident, problem, and change management lifecycles with practical experience implementing or operating ITIL-aligned workflows.

Technical depth across the observability stack — ability to read and interpret logs, traces, and metrics in Datadog (or equivalent: Grafana, Splunk, New Relic). Understanding of APM, SLOs, error budgets, burn-rate alerting, and synthetic monitoring.

Hands-on experience with incident tooling: Datadog, PagerDuty or OpsGenie, JIRA or JIRA Service Management, Slack, and Confluence.

Analytical mindset — ability to identify trends, patterns, and recurring issues from incident data and translate them into actionable recommendations for product and engineering teams.

Experience with SLA/SLO-driven operations where MTTD, MTTA, and MTTR are measured, reported, and improved.

Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML-assisted operations: anomaly detection, alert correlation, predictive alerting, automated remediation, or self-healing automation.

Comfort with 24x7 shift-based operations as part of a follow-the-sun model with handoff overlaps. Weekend on-call (rotating) for critical severities is required.

Experience in the gaming, payments, or fintech industry, and with customer/partner-facing incident communications and status page management.

JIRA Service Management administration experience (workflows, SLA timers, automation rules) and familiarity with Datadog Service Catalog, scorecards, and SLOs — especially burn-rate alerts and multi-window SLOs.

Experience building an operations function from scratch — defining processes, writing runbooks, establishing governance cadences. Background in Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), microservices architecture, or distributed systems. ITIL certification (Foundation or higher) is a plus.