Sr Staff Operational Support Engineer

Dolby Laboratories; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 152,000 - 209,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flex Work

Benefits

Equity potential

Job summary

Dolby Laboratories in Atlanta seeks a Senior Operational Support Engineer to lead critical incidents, drive production reliability, and shape operational practices at scale across OptiView.

You will own incident response for Tier-1 services, implement IaC, and partner with Engineering, DevOps, and Support to improve observability, automation, and live-event readiness. This role requires strong leadership and deep experience with streaming platforms.

Qualifications

• 8 years of relevant experience in operational, support, or similar customer-facing roles.
• Proven ability to own complex problems end-to-end and operate with autonomy.
• Experience with large-scale, production video streaming platforms.
• Strong written and verbal communication for incident reports and customer-facing updates.
• Deep expertise in monitoring, alerting, and logs to diagnose live incidents.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the final escalated operational point for severe incidents.
• Lead multi-system, multi-team incidents across streaming pipelines and delivery platforms.
• Own incident command during major live events and communicate with executives.
• Drive automation-first improvements and runbooks for reliability.
• Partner with Engineering, DevOps and Support to improve observability and resilience.
• Own operational readiness for high-visibility customer events.

Skills

Incident leadership

Production operations

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AI-driven operations

On-call operations

Tools

Grafana

Kibana/ELK

Prometheus

Loki

Job description

Join the leader in entertainment innovation and help us design the future. At Dolby, science meets art, and high tech means more than computer code. As a member of the Dolby team, you’ll see and hear the results of your work everywhere, from movie theaters to smartphones. We continue to revolutionize how people create, deliver, and enjoy entertainment worldwide. To do that, we need the absolute best talent. We’re big enough to give you all the resources you need, and small enough so you can make a real difference and earn recognition for your work. We offer a collegial culture, challenging projects, and excellent compensation and benefits, not to mention a Flex Work approach that is truly flexible to support where, when, and how you do your best work.

The Dolby Cloud Solutions organization builds technologies and innovations that easily integrate into service providers’ infrastructure to make content experiences more effective, meaningful, and engaging for consumers.

Dolby OptiView is building a world-class Operational Support organization responsible for the stability, availability, and operational maturity of our 24/7 live video streaming, ads, player, and real-time delivery platforms. As a Senior Operational Support Engineer, you provide technical and operational leadership for the most complex, high-impact production scenarios. You act as the escalation point beyond L2, lead critical incident response for Tier‑1 customers and marquee live events, and drive systemic improvements across reliability, automation, and operational readiness.

This role goes beyond incident resolution. You shape how we operate at scale, influence platform design through operational feedback, and partner deeply with Engineering, DevOps, Product, and Support leadership to continuously raise the reliability bar for OptiView.

Key Responsibilities Incident Leadership & Escalations

• Serve as the final operational escalation point for severe, complex, or prolonged customer-impacting incidents
• Lead resolution of multi-system, multi-team incidents spanning streaming pipelines, player platforms, ad insertion, DRM, CDN, and real-time services
• Own incident command during major live events, including decision-making under pressure and risk-based trade-offs
• Drive high-quality, executive- and customer-facing incident communications during critical situations
• Coach and support L2 engineers during live incidents, providing guidance and oversight without taking ownership away unnecessarily

Advanced Production Operations & IaC

• Operate confidently and independently on production environments with broad system-level awareness
• Design, review, and approve complex production changes using Infrastructure as Code as the default mechanism
• Deep expertise across:
• Terraform
• Helm & Kubernetes manifests
• GitOps workflows
• CI/CD and deployment pipelines

Partner with Engineering and DevOps to:

• Improve deployment safety and rollback strategies
• Define operational guardrails and blast-radius controls
• Influence platform architecture with operability and resilience in mind

AI-Driven Operations, Automation & Tooling

• Lead adoption of AI-augmented operations across the support organization
• Define and evolve:
• AI-assisted incident triage and prioritization
• Automated and semi-automated runbooks
• Intelligent alert correlation and noise reduction
• Use AI and automation to:
• Reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR)
• Identify systemic patterns across incidents and customers
• Improve the quality and consistency of incident communications
• Champion an automation-first mindset, identifying opportunities where manual operational work should be eliminated entirely

Operational Readiness & Live Event Excellence

• Own operational readiness for high-risk, high-visibility customer events
• Lead pre-event planning and validation, including:
• Architecture and risk reviews
• Runbook and escalation path validation
• Monitoring, alerting, and SLO coverage assessment
• Design and rehearse incident response strategies for worst-case scenarios
• Act as a trusted operational advisor to strategic customers before, during, and after major events

On-Call & 24/7 Operations

• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation, including nights, weekends, and holidays, as part of a global support model
• Ensure smooth handovers between shifts and regions
• Respond to critical alerts within defined SLAs for stream health, player errors, and delivery infrastructure

Root Cause & Continuous Improvement

• Perform or contribute to root cause analysis (RCA) for production incidents
• Document findings, corrective actions, and preventive measuresIdentify recurring issues and work with Engineering and Product teams to eliminate them permanently
• Contribute to and improve runbooks, operational playbooks, and knowledge bases for all OptiView products (Player, ads, live and real time streaming)

Collaboration & Engineering Feedback Loop

• Work closely with Engineering teams to elevate defects, validate fixes, and support production deployments
• Provide feedback on system observability, tooling gaps, and operational risks
• Act as the operational voice during post-incident reviews

Required Skills & Experience Technical Skills

• 8 years of relevant experience in operational, support, or similar customer‑facing roles
• Proven ability to own complex problems end‑to‑end and operate with a high degree of autonomy
• Experience influencing decisions and outcomes beyond individual contribution
• Deep experience operating and supporting large-scale, production video streaming platforms
• Solid troubleshooting skills across distributed systems (APIs, microservices, cloud infrastructure)
• Expert understanding of HLS, DASH, CMAF, WebRTC, DRM and CDN architectures
• Advanced experience working with monitoring, alerting, and logs to diagnose live incidents (Grafana, Kibana/ELK, Prometheus, Loki)
• Correlate backend streaming metrics, player telemetry, and CDN signals to diagnose live customer issues end-to-end.
• Proven ability to safely execute complex production changes under pressure

Leadership & Operational Mindset

• Demonstrated leadership during high-severity, customer-impacting incidents
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability for customer outcomes
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including customer-facing communication during incidents

The Atlanta Area base salary range for this full-time position is $152,200 – $209,200, which can vary if outside this location, plus bonus, benefits, and some roles may also include equity. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job‑related skills, competencies, experience, market demands, internal parity, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range and perks and benefits for your location during the hiring process.

Dolby will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of San Francisco Police Code, Article 49, and Administrative Code, Article 12. Equal Employment Opportunity: Dolby is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Our success depends on the combined skills and talents of all our employees. We are committed to making employment decisions without regard to race, religious creed, color, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, marital status, family status, medical condition, disability, military service, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions or any other classification protected by federal, state, and local laws and ordinances.