Associate Director, Technical Architecture

About the Role

We are seeking a visionary and influential technical leader to join as a Principal Engineer for Observability. You will be the chief architect and evangelist for our company‑wide observability strategy, defining and driving adoption of a unified, full‑stack observability framework that empowers our product teams to build and operate highly reliable, performant, and resilient services. This role is strategic, collaborating across engineering teams and senior leadership to champion operational excellence, rationalize tooling, and design a cohesive, self‑service observability platform.

• Create Strategy: Document and champion a unified, long‑term observability strategy covering metrics, traces, logs, profiles, and more.
• Architect the Future: Design a cohesive, full‑stack solution using best‑in‑class tools and practices, emphasizing self‑service capabilities.
• Drive Standardization and Consolidation: Identify and decommission redundant or overlapping tools, steering the organization toward a standardized, cost‑effective observability service.
• Partner with SRE: Collaborate with the Site Reliability Engineering team, promoting SRE principles, defining and managing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets, and highlighting critical observability for them.
• Evangelize and Educate: Communicate complex observability topics, benefits, and strategic decisions persuasively to senior leadership and stakeholders across IT and business domains.
• Lead by Influence: Act as the senior technical expert and thought leader in the observability space, mentoring engineers and guiding teams in best practices for instrumentation, monitoring, and incident analysis using AIOps.
• Stay on the Cutting Edge: Continuously research industry trends, emerging technologies (e.g., eBPF, Open Telemetry), and best practices to keep the observability strategy modern and effective.

• Bachelor's degree.
• 10+ years of experience in Observability, software engineering, SRE, or platform engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and implementing large‑scale technical solutions.
• Deep expertise in all telemetry types and mastery of tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, Big Panda, and xMatters.
• Strategic leadership:
  Demonstrable experience creating and executing a technical strategy across multiple teams or an entire organization.
• SRE and SLO mastery:
  Hands‑on experience defining, implementing, and managing SLOs and error budgets.
• Strong understanding and practical experience with the Open Telemetry standard for instrumentation and telemetry collection.
• Multi‑cloud experience:
  Designing solutions that operate across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Exceptional communication and influence:
  Ability to explain complex technical concepts to senior executives and non‑technical audiences and to drive consensus in a large organization.

• Experience leading tooling rationalization and platform consolidation projects.
• Fin Ops knowledge:
  Understanding of cloud cost management principles as they apply to observability data and tooling.
• Knowledge of eBPF for advanced, low‑level system observability and performance analysis.
• Product mindset:
  Experience thinking about internal platforms as products, focusing on user experience, self‑service, and clear documentation.

Salary range: $ – $. Additional benefits include medical, dental, vision, retirement (401(k)), paid holidays, vacation, and compassionate and sick days. Eligible candidates may receive annual bonuses and long‑term incentive plans.

We are an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, providing equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. As a federal contractor, we comply with all affirmative action requirements for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.