Senior Engineering Manager, Observability Engineering

Description

The company makes the company, an open source programming model that simplifies code, makes applications more reliable, and lets developers spend their time on features instead of plumbing.

The team is building the reliable base that developers depend on, and this role is part of building it.

The company is growing and wants people who share its values, question conventional thinking, and want to shape its direction. Strong interest in developer experience, open-source software and communities is a good fit.

Teams at the leading edge of AI run on the company, including OpenAI, which handles millions of requests on it, and Cursor, which runs its cloud coding agents on it at over 50 million actions a day across more than 7 million workflows. Lovable, Abridge and Hebbia also build their agents on it. AI-native companies ran 1.86 trillion actions on the company Cloud in the last year, and that number keeps rising. The company recently raised a $550M Series E at a $12.55B valuation to build the durable execution layer that agentic software relies on.

Observability is how the company and its customers confirm that this layer is working. The role covers two areas. Internally, you run the telemetry platform engineers use to operate a multi-tenant service that some of the largest companies rely on. Externally, observability is part of the product, since customers debug their own workflows through what the platform exposes and the quality of that experience matters.

The company wants a leader who has run observability at scale, treats telemetry cost and cardinality as core engineering limits, and has the operational discipline to answer for live-site outcomes on a platform where reliability is the product.

Responsibilities

• Own the team's technical roadmap and delivery, in line with wider engineering priorities. Compare build, buy and open-source options by weighing reliability, customer needs and cost.
• Lead, hire and develop a team of engineers who take strong ownership. Shape technical decisions through design and code reviews. Coach engineers, support their growth and remove what slows them down.
• Own the path high-cardinality telemetry takes through ingestion, storage, querying and visualization across a multi-tenant, multi-cloud fleet. Build self-serve tools for a growing engineering organization.
• Own alerting and incident response tooling from start to finish. Improve how detection, routing and runbooks work so on-call stays sustainable, and turn incident reviews into lasting reliability gains.
• Work with Product and SDK teams on the telemetry offered to customers, including metrics, traces and workflow-level diagnostics. Talk directly with design-partner customers and feed what you learn into the roadmap.
• Own observability unit economics, including cost per ingested series, per query and per namespace. Set cardinality budgets, consolidate tools where sprawl has built up, and manage vendor relationships against clear value criteria.
• Work with Engineering, Product, Security and Support to settle competing priorities and deliver shared results. Explain technical tradeoffs and risks clearly to senior leaders and non-specialists.

Requirements

• Proven record leading engineering teams that build and run observability, monitoring or telemetry platforms at scale, with strong operational practices.
• Demonstrated success leading teams that build and operate production observability platforms, covering hiring, coaching, performance management and delivery.
• 15+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, including 7+ years managing people, with clear ownership of delivery and live-site outcomes.
• Experience hiring, setting levels for, and managing performance.
• Deep distributed-systems knowledge and the hands-on skill to shape architecture and execution directly, not from a distance.
• Experience running multi-tenant infrastructure that other people's production workloads depend on.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. An advanced degree is a plus.
• Strong communication skills. You can work across engineering, product and leadership and turn customer feedback into a roadmap.
• Strong leadership and coaching. You can grow engineers and build a healthy, accountable, high-ownership team, including through reorgs, acquisitions or platform migrations.
• Set priorities and ship incremental improvements without complete information. Make tradeoffs explicit and adjust plans as customer and operational needs shift.
• Working knowledge of observability building blocks (metrics, logs, traces, profiling and alerting) and the tradeoffs between them at scale.
• Time-series and telemetry fundamentals: cardinality control, retention and downsampling, query performance, and hot/cold storage tiering.
• Live-site reliability practice: defining SLAs and SLOs, on-call, incident management, and postmortem-driven improvement.
• Ability to review and raise the standard of technical artifacts such as design docs and code reviews across a distributed-systems codebase.
• Preferred: applying AI or LLM techniques to triage, anomaly detection or incident summaries, with a realistic view of where they help and where they don't.
• Preferred: deep OpenTelemetry knowledge, including collector architecture, semantic conventions and instrumentation strategy.
• Preferred: running the open-source observability stack in production, such as Prometheus, Mimir, Thanos, Cortex, Grafana, Loki, Tempo or ClickHouse.
• Preferred: building observability as a product for external developers, not only internal tools.
• Preferred: Kubernetes internals and multi-cloud delivery across AWS, GCP and Azure.
• Preferred: vendor consolidation or migration programs (commercial APM or SaaS to open source, or the reverse) with measurable cost and reliability results.
• Preferred: developer experience or engineering productivity work, treating internal engineers as customers with measurable experience.
• Preferred: prior work at a developer infrastructure or open-source company where the community feeds back into the product.

Conditions

The company Technologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on any basis covered by applicable law. Hiring is based on qualifications, merit and business need.