Lead Management & Observability Standards

Job Title:

Alert Management & Observability Standards Lead

Location:

Fairfield , CA

Job Description:

Job Title:

Alert Management & Observability Standards Lead Role Summary

The Alert Management & Observability Standards Lead is responsible for rationalizing and governing all system alerts to ensure they align with department priorities, operational coverage models, and service reliability goals. This role defines alerting standards, reviews and approves alerts before they are routed to the 24×7 Eyes-on-Glass Operations team, and establishes a scalable approach to cataloging alert response instructions (runbooks/playbooks) so responders can take consistent, high-quality actions.

This position operates at the intersection of the IT Operations Command Center (OCC), engineering/application teams, platform/monitoring tool owners, and service owners, ensuring alerts are actionable, prioritized, and paired with clear response guidance.

• Business/service criticality and operational priority
• Actionability (clear operator action available)
• Signal-to-noise (duplicate/low-value alerts removed or suppressed)
• Ownership and escalation paths
• Perform regular alert reviews (new + existing) to ensure alert quality, correct routing, and alignment with operational coverage.
• Lead continuous improvement efforts to reduce alert fatigue while preserving detection of true incidents and high-impact degradation.

• Severity definitions and thresholds
• Required metadata (service, CI, owner, runbook link, escalation)
• Naming conventions and tagging taxonomy
• Routing rules and “when to page vs. when to ticket”
• Create a standardized Alert Design Checklist and approval workflow (e.g., “Definition of Done” for alert onboarding).
• Partner with tool/platform owners to ensure standards are embedded in monitoring tooling (templates, required fields, automated validation).

• Go to 24×7 Eyes-on-Glass for immediate triage
• Route to on-call engineering directly
• Create tickets for business-hours handling
• Be suppressed, aggregated, or converted to dashboards/health indicators

Ensure routing aligns with:

• Operational responsibilities and skills of the Eyes-on-Glass team
• Department priorities (e.g., safety, reliability, customer impact)
• Service ownership and support models

• “What does this alert mean?” (symptoms + impact)
• “What to check first” (triage steps)
• “What actions to take” (standard remediation)
• “When to escal`? (clear escalation triggers)
• Links to dashboards, logs, SOPs, and known issues
• Own the runbook template and ensure runbooks are versioned, maintained, and reviewed on a defined cadence.
• Partner with service owners to ensure runbooks stay current as systems change.

• Alert volume trends by service and severity
• Percentage of alerts with runbooks and valid ownership
• Alert “actionability rate” and noise reduction
• Mean time to acknowledge / triage effectiveness (as applicable)
• Facilitate governance forums (weekly/monthly) with service owners and engineering leads to review alert quality and backlog.

• Coach service teams on best practices: SLIs/SLOs, alert thresholds, dependency monitoring, and incident correlation.
• Drive adoption of observability patterns (golden signals, health indicators, multi-signal alerting).
• Support major incident learning by feeding post-incident insights back into improved alerts and runbooks.

• 5+ years in IT Operations, SRE, Observability, Monitoring Engineering, or Incident Management
• Demonstrated success reducing noise and improving actionability across enterprise alerting ecosystems
• Experience with common monitoring/observability tools (e.g., Splunk, App Dynamics, Dynatrace,
  · Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, Azure Monitor, Cloud Watch, Service Now Event Mgmt or similar)
• Strong understanding of:
• Incident response workflows and operational coverage models (24×7 vs. business hours)
• CMDB/service ownership concepts and dependency mapping
• Standard operating…