Principal Observability Architect

Job Title : Principal Observability Architect

Duration : Up to 1 Year

Location : Remote

Position Summary:

Client is seeking a Principal Observability Architect to establish and lead the observability strategy for a globally distributed payments platform. This individual will own the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of observability capabilities across applications, infrastructure, cloud services, and transaction processing environments.

The ideal candidate has built enterprise-scale observability programs, understands modern SRE practices, and can translate massive amounts of telemetry into actionable operational intelligence. This person will serve as a technical authority during critical incidents and partner closely with engineering, platform, and production operations teams.

Responsibilities:

• Define and lead enterprise observability strategy.
• Design unified monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting architecture.
• Establish observability standards and instrumentation requirements across engineering teams.
• Lead implementation and optimization of platforms such as Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Splunk, Grafana, New Relic, or similar.
• Improve signal quality and reduce alert fatigue.
• Develop dependency maps, service maps, and operational dashboards.
• Partner with platform engineering teams to enhance application reliability.
• Drive AI-enabled anomaly detection and intelligent alerting capabilities.
• Serve as an escalation point during Sev1 and Sev2 incidents.
• Establish KPIs, SLIs, SLOs, and observability governance practices.

Required Experience:

• 10+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Observability Architecture.
• Experience supporting large-scale cloud-native environments.
• Deep expertise with modern telemetry tooling.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, containers, and cloud platforms.
• Experience designing enterprise observability operating models.
• Experience leading cross-functional reliability initiatives.

Preferred:

• Payments, fintech, banking, or highly regulated industry experience.
• AWS expertise.
• OpenTelemetry implementation experience.
• AI/ML-driven monitoring experience.