Team Leader - Enterprise Cloud Servies - Observability

Company Description

Why Wellmark:
We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, and we've built our reputation on over 80 years' worth of trust. We are not motivated by profits. We are motivated by the well-being of our friends, family, and neighbors-our members. If you're passionate about joining an organization working hard to put its members first, to provide best-in-class service, and one that is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying today!

Why Wellmark Technology? Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning the outcome, and driving organizational change to transform how we work.

Job Description

In this formal leadership role, you will lead a team of engineers and agile team members while establishing a unified observability strategy and platform for engineering across the organization. Defines the roadmap and governance model for telemetry collection, correlation, retention, and access; develops standards for service instrumentation, tagging, and golden signals; and implements SLO/SLI frameworks that connect reliability targets to customer experience and business outcomes.

Builds reusable tooling and enablement (dashboards, alert libraries, runbooks, automation, and self-service onboarding) that empowers teams to detect issues early, respond consistently, and learn from incidents through blameless postmortems and continuous improvement. Partners with product owners, solution architects, security, and operations leaders to align observability investments to strategic priorities, strengthen resilience, and manage telemetry cost and performance at scale-while coaching and developing team members and cultivating a culture of accountability, inclusion, and excellence.

Qualifications

Preferred:

• Prior formal leadership experience; creating clear expectations and leading toward results.
• Experience designing, implementing, or governing observability platforms at scale, including metrics, logs, and distributed tracing across multi-cloud or hybrid architectures
• Strong analytical mindset with experience using observability and analytics tools (e.g., Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, New Relic, or similar) to drive operational and reliability improvements
• Proven ability to define and operationalize service level indicators (SLIs), service level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets, and to connect these frameworks to customer experience and business outcomes
• Background in site reliability engineering (SRE), observability engineering, distributed systems, or platform engineering, with the ability to operate effectively in complex cloud-native environments
• Experience establishing instrumentation standards, telemetry schemas, and tagging strategies to enable effective correlation, root-cause analysis, and cross-service visibility
• Ability to evaluate observability tools and platforms from scalability, performance, usability, and cost-efficiency perspectives-not solely technical implementation
• Experience building reusable observability assets such as dashboards, alerting frameworks, runbooks, and self-service onboarding capabilities for engineering teams
• Experience working in regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance) with an understanding of logging, monitoring, and data retention requirements for compliance and security
• Familiarity with incident management practices, including alert tuning, on-call models, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement processes
• Understanding of telemetry lifecycle management, including data ingestion, sampling, retention, and cost-performance optimization

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or related field, or direct and applicable work experience.
• Minimum 7 years of experience in cloud engineering, Dev Ops, or infrastructure roles.
• Informal leadership experience typically gained through project management or by coaching/mentoring others by providing guidance and feedback to help an employee to strengthen their knowledge and skills.
• Experience leading teams in an agile software development environment. Experience with frameworks in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), supporting Agile Release Trains and aligning designs with Lean-Agile principles.
• Demonstrated ability to build product roadmaps.
• Hands on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP services and architecture.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, Cloud Formation) and container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes).
• Strong collaboration skills with ability to build relationships across technology divisions.
• Proven experience leading platform/shared service teams, either informally or formally, and delivering…