8+ years of experience in software engineering with deep expertise in observability, reliability engineering, or telemetry platform development. Proven track record of leading cross-functional technical initiatives — driving alignment, adoption, and delivery across multiple engineering teams you don't directly manage. Experience building telemetry and observability systems from the ground up — not just configuring tools, but designing instrumentation strategies, telemetry pipelines, and data models that scale to thousands of services and billions of events.
Deep hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry — SDK instrumentation, Collector architecture (agent and gateway tiers), processors, exporters, context propagation, and metadata enrichment at scale. Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets — with hands-on experience defining, implementing, and operating SLO-based alerting in production. Experience designing alerting architectures for complex distributed systems — including burn-rate alerts, multi-signal correlation, intelligent routing, and alert storm prevention.
Strong proficiency in at least two of: Kotlin, Java, Go, or Python. Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, or Splunk — including APM, metrics, traces, monitors, and dashboards. Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including microservices architectures, API gateways, event-driven systems, and service-to-service dependencies. Experience solving hard telemetry problems at scale — sampling strategies, high-cardinality metric management, tail-based sampling, cross-service trace stitching, and pipeline reliability under load.
Strong communication and stakeholder management skills — ability to translate complex technical observability concepts into clear strategies for engineering leadership and partner teams. Demonstrated ability to establish org-wide engineering standards and drive adoption through influence, documentation, and tooling rather than mandate. BS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.