Observability Engineer

Observability Engineer

This is a full-time, 40-hour per week position supporting the Information Services Division. The position is on-site in Oklahoma City, OK.

The Observability Engineer is responsible for building, maintaining, and continuously improving the monitoring and observability capabilities that keep the organization's server, cloud, and network environments healthy. Using Datadog or similar platforms, this role instruments infrastructure and applications, builds meaningful dashboards and alerts, and turns raw telemetry into early warning signals that let teams find and fix problems before they impact the business.

This is a hands-on technical role for someone who enjoys making complex environments visible, understandable, and measurably more reliable.

Position Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain monitoring and observability tooling (Datadog or similar) across server, cloud, and network environments.
• Instrument infrastructure, applications, and services with metrics, logs, traces, and synthetic checks to provide full-stack visibility.
• Build and maintain dashboards that give clear, role-appropriate visibility into system health for engineers, managers, and leadership.
• Configure and tune alerting thresholds and escalation policies to catch real issues early while minimizing noise and alert fatigue.
• Integrate monitoring tools with incident management, ticketing, and on-call notification systems (e.g., Pager Duty, Service Now, Slack).

• Track and report on key IT health indicators such as uptime, latency, error rates, capacity headroom, and patch/compliance status across multiple environments.
• Partner with infrastructure, cloud, and network teams to identify recurring issues and drive root-cause fixes rather than repeated firefighting.
• Support capacity planning by analyzing utilization trends and flagging environments approaching risk thresholds.
• Contribute to post-incident reviews by providing telemetry, timelines, and health data that clarify what happened and why.
• Continuously refine monitoring coverage as new systems, services, and cloud resources are added, retiring stale checks and dashboards.

• Work closely with server, cloud, network, and application teams to understand what 'healthy' looks like for each environment and translate that into monitoring coverage.
• Document monitoring standards, runbooks, and dashboard conventions so coverage stays consistent as the environment grows.
• Train and support other engineers in interpreting dashboards, alerts, and observability data.
• Evaluate and recommend improvements or additions to the observability toolset as monitoring needs evolve.

Physical Demands and Work Environment

• Office-based work involving extensive computer and phone use.
• Requires long periods of sitting, up to eight hours a day.
• Possible on-call rotation
• Work environment is generally quiet, occasional travel may be required.

Education and Experience

• Associate's or Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or related field, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• 3+ years of experience in infrastructure monitoring, observability, systems administration, or IT operations.
• Hands-on experience with Datadog or a comparable observability platform (e.g., Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana).
• Working knowledge of server, cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and network fundamentals sufficient to instrument and troubleshoot across environments.
• Experience building dashboards, alerts, and notification workflows that support fast, accurate incident response.
• Comfortable working with scripting or query languages (e.g., Python, Power Shell, Bash, DQL/PromQL) to build and refine monitoring logic.

• Datadog certification or equivalent vendor certification.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) for deploying monitoring agents and configuration at scale.
• Familiarity with ITSM practices (incident, problem, change management) and on-call/escalation processes.
• Exposure to AIOps or automated remediation approaches that reduce manual intervention.
• Experience monitoring environments in regulated industries with attention to security and compliance requirements.

About OMES

The Office of Management and Enterprise Services provides excellent service, expert guidance and continuous improvement in support of our partners' goals. We are a highly qualified workforce committed to serve those who serve Oklahomans and make government run in the most efficient, innovative manner possible.

OMES is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities may be provided upon request.

The State of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of genetic information, race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, or disability.