Lead SRE- Observability

Position Summary

athenahealth is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to help evolve our observability and telemetry platform. In this role you will design and operate scalable, resilient infrastructure that enables engineering teams to monitor, troubleshoot, and run distributed services reliably at scale.

The role is central to improving the reliability, visibility, and scalability of the systems that support athenahealth’s engineering and cloud environments. It directly enables better incident response, stronger operational performance, and more reliable healthcare technology.

The Observability Engineering team builds and operates the telemetry, monitoring, and reliability platforms that support athenahealth’s cloud infrastructure and engineering organizations. The team processes large volumes of logs, metrics, traces, and events to help teams develop, troubleshoot, and operate highly available healthcare applications.

• Build and operate scalable observability and telemetry platforms that process logs, metrics, traces, and events across production environments.
• Support monitoring, alerting, and instrumentation strategies that improve service visibility and operational insight.
• Partner with engineering teams to strengthen telemetry collection and overall observability.
• Design resilient, automated infrastructure and platform services that improve reliability, scalability, and efficiency.
• Develop Infrastructure as Code and automation solutions that reduce toil and improve consistency.
• Lead technical initiatives from architecture through implementation with attention to performance, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues involving distributed systems, Linux infrastructure, networking, cloud services, and telemetry pipelines.
• Participate in incident response and on‑call processes.
• Help drive operational excellence, root‑cause analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Mentor engineers on SRE best practices, observability strategy, and scalable systems design.
• Contribute to long‑term platform strategy and reliability improvements.
• Influence technical decisions across engineering organizations.

• 7+ years of experience operating and engineering large‑scale production infrastructure and distributed systems.
• Strong expertise in Linux systems engineering, cloud infrastructure, and SRE practices.
• Proven experience designing and operating observability and telemetry platforms.
• Hands‑on experience with tools such as Open Search/Elasticsearch, Kafka, Prometheus, Grafana, Vector, Fluentd, Open Telemetry, Click House, or similar.
• Experience building IaC solutions using Terraform, Cloud Formation, or equivalent tooling.
• Strong automation and software engineering skills using Python, Go, or Bash.
• Experience troubleshooting large‑scale distributed systems in production with a focus on availability, performance, scalability, and resiliency.
• Experience operating services in cloud‑native environments, including AWS and containerized platforms.
• Strong understanding of monitoring strategy, telemetry pipelines, incident response, root‑cause analysis, and operational excellence.
• Ability to communicate effectively across engineering organizations and influence technical decision‑making.

• Experience operating high‑scale telemetry or analytics platforms with large ingestion volumes.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD systems, and modern platform engineering practices.
• Strong networking and troubleshooting experience using tools such as tcpdump and Wireshark.
• Experience leading cross‑functional engineering efforts and mentoring within SRE or infrastructure organizations.
• Familiarity with healthcare technology or other highly regulated production environments.

Base salary range: $143,000 – $243,000. Compensation also includes discretionary bonuses, variable pay, and equity opportunities.

athenahealth is an equal‑opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected class or other status.