Sr. Platform Ops Engineer

VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant's sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Fandango is looking for a SENIOR PLATFORM ENGINEER to build our next big thing in platform growth across Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Fandango at Home.

In this role, you'll join the Platform Operations team and report to the Sr. Director of Platform Operations, contributing to the foundational infrastructure and tools that power how we enable developer productivity while delivering platform enhancements. As a Platform Engineer, you will focus on building and maintaining the core platform layers that support our engineering organization.

If you enjoy solving complex problems, building for scale, and making a measurable impact - we'd love to meet you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

As a Senior Platform Engineer on our team, you will:

• Build and maintain core platform infrastructure that serves as the foundation for engineering teams across the organization
• Drive and participate in solution architecture and delivery across diverse domains, offering expertise in AWS cloud infrastructure and resources, containers (ECS/Kubernetes) and cloud-native architectures
• Develop, enhance, and operate platform capabilities including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, reusable patterns, and automation solutions that enable rapid, reliable, and secure deployments
• Design and implement standardized, reusable cloud infrastructure patterns and templates that help teams adopt best practices while maintaining security and compliance requirements
• Demonstrate, enable, and promote consistent adoption of software delivery practices and solutions that optimize for fast feedback, observability, and operational excellence
• Proactively collaborate with product and engineering teams, taking technical leadership in areas of cross-functional projects while sharing knowledge and best practices
• Evaluate existing standards and practices, identify gaps, and implement improvements to strengthen Development, Security, and Operational practices across the organization
• Demonstrate excellent communication skills through proactive status updates, clear documentation, knowledge sharing, and effective collaboration when facing technical challenges
• Partner closely with engineering teams to understand their needs, refine requirements, and deliver solutions that enhance developer productivity while meeting project objectives
• Work with emerging technologies around AI, MCP, and RAG
• Cost optimization - Monitor and optimize cloud spend, implementing cost governance strategies and right-sizing recommendations.
• Service reliability Maintain SLOs/SLIs/SLAs, improve uptime targets, and help implement reliability engineering practices.
• Mentorship - Mentor junior and mid-level engineers, conduct design reviews, and raise the technical bar across the platform team.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR:

• AWS Expertise: 6+ years of hands-on experience with AWS, with a focus on Infrastructure as Code
• Linux Proficiency: Minimum of 4 years of experience managing and maintaining Linux systems
• Automation/Scripting: 3+ years of experience with Python for automation and scripting
• Git and GitOps: Practical experience and comfortable using Git and automated workflows
• AWS Security Knowledge: Familiarity with AWS security best practices, including DNS, secure VPCs, and database security (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• Communication & Collaboration: Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences
• Problem-Solving Mindset: Eagerness to learn, grow, and tackle challenges in a fast-paced environment
• Troubleshooting & debugging - Proven ability to troubleshoot complex distributed systems issues across networking, compute, storage, and application layers. Comfortable with packet captures, log analysis, performance profiling, and diagnosing intermittent failures in production.
• Terraform / Infrastructure as Code: 3+ years of hands-on experience with Terraform, including module development, state management, and multi-environment workflows. Comfortable writing, reviewing, and maintaining IaC that provisions and manages cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Networking fundamentals - VPCs, load balancers, DNS, CDNs, service mesh, network troubleshooting.
• Monitoring/Observability - Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, ELK stacks.
• Incident management experience - PagerDuty, on-call rotations, post-mortem culture.

BONUS POINTS FOR:

• AWS Certifications: Relevant certifications such as AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
• Background in building or maintaining systems that support scalable application environments and event-driven architectures
• Understanding of container security and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Fundamentals of running AI-related services
• Experience contributing to open-source projects or internal platform tools
• Multi-account AWS strategy (Organizations, Control Tower, Landing Zones
• Chaos engineering / game days
• Platform-as-a-product thinking (internal developer portals, Backstage)

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

For LA County and City Residents Only: VERSANT Media will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories, or arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with relevant legal requirements, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, where applicable.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to [email protected].

VERSANT Media is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. We include a good faith pay range for each position to comply with applicable state and local pay transparency laws and to promote equity across our organization. Actual compensation will be based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, experience, and location and may include additional forms of compensation and benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, etc.

VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at VERSANT via-email, the Internet, or in any form and/or method without a valid written Statement of Work in place for this position from VERSANT's Talent Acquisition team will be deemed the sole property of VERSANT. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by VERSANT as a result of the referral or through other means.