Production Support Engineer (L2/L3) - Java / SRE Background

Job Title: Production Support Engineer (L2/L3) — Americas Shift | Java / SRE Background
Location: United States, Canada, Mexico — Remote (EST/CST only)
Employment Type: Full-time, B2B Contract
Experience Level: Middle+ / Senior
Salary: 4500$-5500$ / Monthly
English level: Advanced / Native
About the Project
Our client is building a follow-the-sun DevOps and production support team for a multi-venue hospitality and leisure platform operating across the UK and US. The platform powers guest-facing booking, payments, kiosks, and in-venue game systems — running on Kubernetes on AWS, with ~150 repositories and live operations since June 2026.
We are looking for a Production Support Engineer (L2/L3) to own the Americas seat on our Client's DevOps team. This is a hands-on, incident-driven role for someone with a Java developer or SRE background who thrives in live production environments and works confidently with modern AI tooling.
What You'll Do
Own incidents (P1–P4) during the Americas shift: acknowledge PagerDuty pages, open incident channels, and update the client in Zendesk and Teams within response targets.
Investigate production defects end-to-end: Datadog logs, metrics, and traces; SQL against service databases; reading the service code to find the root cause.
Ship small code and config fixes through review and CI/CD pipelines.
Operate Kubernetes workloads: restarts, rollbacks, config changes; support deploys and maintenance windows.
Use AI coding agents for code reading, log analysis, and drafting fixes — always verifying output before acting on it.
Write client-facing updates in plain language and RCAs for P1 incidents.
Run written handovers at shift boundaries and work the Jira/Zendesk queue.
Requirements
Must-have:
4+ years of experience as a Support Engineer (Middle+/Senior) with a Java developer or SRE background.
Hands-on Java experience — ability to read, debug, and make small fixes in Java services.
Kubernetes — hands-on operational experience.
SQL — confident querying against production databases.
CI/CD — practical experience shipping fixes through pipelines.
Incident handling — P1–P4 ownership, on-call mindset.
Works with AI agents critically: verifies what the agent produces instead of trusting it blindly.
Reads unfamiliar code and makes small fixes independently.
English — Advanced / Native.
Location: USA, Canada, or Mexico — must live in EST or CST time zone.
Personal traits: attentive, takes ownership, communicates clearly.
Nice-to-have:
AWS, Datadog, PagerDuty, GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy, Terraform.
Previous production on-call experience.
Domain knowledge in hospitality, booking, or payments systems.
Work Conditions
Allocation: Full-time, 160 h/month (Jira worklogs).
Shift: Fixed PagerDuty layer 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM Central Time (CDT in summer, CST in winter) — all year round.
Handover: 1 hour for written handover at shift boundaries.
Weekend on-call: ~1 weekend in 4, by pager (not at a desk).
Equipment: Own laptop required.
Security: Strict access rules — 1Password, hardware key, VPN, least privilege. A 15–30 min client intro call is required before any access is granted.
Duration: Long-term.
Project stage: Live operations. Team of 4 on follow-the-sun rotation since June 2026.
Tech Stack
AWS · Kubernetes · Terraform · Datadog · PagerDuty · GitHub + GitHub Actions · Octopus Deploy · Jira · Zendesk · Slack · Microsoft Teams · 1Password · AI coding agents
Why Join
Live production ownership — real incidents, real impact, real learning.
Modern stack with AI tooling — you'll work with AI agents as part of your daily workflow.
Follow-the-sun model — clear shift boundaries, no 24/7 grind.
Long-term engagement on a stable, live platform.

Work arrangement
Yes