Associate Director, Technical Architecture (Richmond)

Job Description

About the Role

We are seeking a visionary and influential technical leader to join as a Principal Engineer for Observability. In this role, you will be the chief architect and evangelist for our company-wide observability strategy. Your mission is to define and drive the adoption of a unified, full-stack observability framework that empowers our product teams to build and operate highly reliable, performant, and resilient services.

This is not just a technical role; it is a strategic one. You will work across organizational boundaries, from engineering teams to senior leadership, to champion a culture of operational excellence. You will be responsible for rationalizing our tooling landscape, eliminating redundancy, and designing a cohesive, self-service observability platform that is easy to consume. If you are passionate about turning complex technical concepts into clear business value and leading large-scale change, this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact.

What You'll Do

• Create Strategy: Create, document, and champion a unified, long-term observability strategy for the entire company, covering all telemetry types like metrics, traces, logs, profiles and more.

• Architect the Future: Design a cohesive, full-stack observability solution using best-in-class tools and practices. Ensure our architecture promotes a product-oriented approach with a strong focus on self-service capabilities.

• Drive Standardization and Consolidation: Actively identify and help decommission redundant or overlapping tools, driving the organization towards a standardized, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage observability service.

• Join forces with SRE team: Partner with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, promote their principles, such as defining, measuring, and managing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets and how critical Observability for them.

• Evangelize and Educate: Clearly and persuasively communicate complex observability topics, benefits, and strategic decisions 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. Mentor engineers and guide teams in implementing best practices for instrumentation (OpenTelemetry), monitoring, and incident analysis using AIOps.

• Stay on the Cutting Edge: Continuously research industry trends, emerging technologies (like eBPF, OpenTelemetry), and best practices to ensure our observability strategy remains modern and effective.

Must-Have Skills & Experience

• Education-: Bachelor's degree

• Extensive Technical Experience: 10+ years in Observability, software engineering, SRE, or platform engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and implementing large-scale technical solutions.

• Deep Observability Expertise: Subject matter expert on Observability practices and collection of all types of telemetry. SME for the tools that support them (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, BigPanda, xMatters or others).

• Strategic Leadership: Demonstrable experience creating and executing a technical strategy across multiple teams or an entire organization.

• SRE and SLO Mastery: Deep, practical knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering principles, with hands-on experience defining, implementing, and managing SLOs and error budgets.

• OpenTelemetry Proficiency: Strong understanding and practical experience with the OpenTelemetry standard for instrumentation and telemetry collection.

• Multi-Cloud Experience: Experience designing solutions that operate across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Exceptional Communication & Influence: World-class ability to explain highly complex technical concepts to senior executives and non-technical audiences. Proven ability to lead by influence and drive consensus in a large organization.

Nice-to-Have Skills & Experience

• Tool Rationalization: Experience leading projects to consolidate tooling and migrate teams to a centralized platform.

• FinOps Knowledge: Understanding of cloud cost management principles and how they apply to observability data and tooling.

• eBPF Knowledge: Familiarity with eBPF for advanced, low-level system observability and performance analysis.

• Product Mindset: Experience thinking about internal platforms as products, with a focus on user experience, self-service, and clear documentation.

Why Join Us?

• Unmatched Impact: Define the technical direction for a critical capability across the entire company, directly influencing the reliability of all our products.

• Strategic Autonomy: Be the ultimate authority and thought leader in the observability domain with the freedom to shape our future.

• Executive Visibility: Work directly with senior leadership to connect deep technical initiatives with strategic business outcomes.

• Culture: Join a forward-thinking organization that invests in technical excellence and empowers its leaders to drive meaningful change.

Required Skills:

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Technology, Cybersecurity, Emerging Technologies, Executive Visibility, FinOps Operating Model, Methods and Tools, Operational Excellence, Platform Engineering, Reliability Engineering, Requirements Management, Software Development, Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Solution Architecture, Stakeholder Engagement, Strategic Leadership, Strategic Planning, System Designs, Technical Advice, Telemetry

Preferred Skills:

Preferred skills are outlined in the main job description.

San Francisco Residents Only:

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Los Angeles Residents Only:

We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance

Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully

Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp & Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.

Our company is committed to inclusion, ensuring that candidates can engage in a hiring process that exhibits their true capabilities.

As an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer, we provide equal opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibit 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. For more information about personal rights under the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment laws, visit:

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We are proud to a company that embraces the value of bringing together, talented, and committed people with diverse experiences, perspectives, skills and backgrounds. The fastest way to breakthrough innovation is when people with diverse ideas, broad experiences, backgrounds, and skills come together in an inclusive environment. We encourage our colleagues to respectfully challenge one another’s thinking and approach problems collectively.

Learn more about your rights, including under California, Colorado and other US State Acts (

Employee Status:

Regular

Relocation:

No relocation

VISA Sponsorship:

No

Travel Requirements:

10%

Flexible Work Arrangements:

Remote

Shift:

1st - Day

Valid Driving License:

No

Hazardous Material(s):

N/A

Job Posting End Date:

07/31/2026

***A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the day** BEFORE the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the day BEFORE the job posting end date.

Requisition ID:

R403622