Overview
Salary: $100-109 Hourly W2, Benefits and 401k matching Duration: 1 year assignment Note: This is a remote role but must be committed to working EST hours. The Personalization (PZN) team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. We seek to understand the world of music, podcasts, and audiobooks better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build, which include destinations like Home and Search as well as original personalized playlists such as Made For You, Discover Weekly, and Daily Mix. The SeshGen product area builds and runs the systems behind generative and interactive listening experiences, including AI DJ, AI Playlist, and personalized sessions. SeshGen owns over 1,000 backend services, and many of them are stable and in maintenance mode. We are building a dedicated contractor team to own the operation and maintenance of these services, so our product squads can focus on new features. What You'll Do
Be part of the SeshGen goalie rotation for maintenance-mode services: respond to and triage PagerDuty alerts, apply fixes (restarts, rollbacks, scaling), and escalate to the owning squad when needed
Keep services up to date: dependency updates and security patches on a quarterly cycle, and infrastructure upgrades such as Kubernetes version bumps and GCP migrations
Reduce alert noise: tune thresholds, fix auto-resolving alerts, set up alert grouping, and turn off alerts that are not actionable
Identify unused services and decommission them safely using Backstage tooling
Write and maintain runbooks and service documentation for every service in scope
Keep the service catalog accurate: component ownership, reliability tiers, and PagerDuty routing
Work closely with SeshGen engineers and engineering managers through handovers, rotation chapter meetings, and alert reviews
Reduce tech debt and complexity if needed
Drive architecture discussions and create system designs in alignment with internal teams
Drive scoping and roadmapping of the technical execution
Track progress, escalate issues, and help unblock the team
Who You Are
You have experience operating distributed, high-volume backend services in production, and you know how to deploy them and keep them running
You are comfortable triaging incidents on systems you did not build, using runbooks, dashboards, and logs
You have hands-on experience with Java backend services
You have experience with monitoring and alerting tools such as PagerDuty, Grafana, and Prometheus/PromQL
You write clear documentation and enjoy leaving systems better than you found them
You are comfortable using AI coding tools to speed up maintenance and migration work
You communicate clearly and work well asynchronously with distributed teams
Top 3 Hard Skills: Senior-level Java backend development, operating and maintaining distributed high-volume production systems, and scaling systems and removing technical debt
Top 3 Soft Skills: Strong written and verbal communication, effective prioritization skills, and cross-team collaboration and alignment
Nice-to-Have Skills: Kubernetes, GCP, Python, experience maintaining ultra-high-volume systems serving hundreds of millions of users, fast-paced non-music industry experience, or prior contractor experience
Strategic Role & Influence: The role stabilizes core systems serving hundreds of thousands of users, enabling internal squads to develop new AI features. Influence is exerted through technical steering groups and cross-team operational alignment
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Skill
$100.00 - $109.00 / hr
401(k)
Nov 06, 2026