SRE Observability Technical Lead - Vice President

Citigroup Inc.; Chennai District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 6,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Citi is seeking an SRE Observability Specialist to drive end-to-end monitoring and telemetry across Payments platforms. You will partner with SREs, developers, and platform teams to embed telemetry, define SLOs, and build meaningful dashboards for critical payments flows.

The ideal candidate has deep technical know-how, strong collaboration skills, and the ability to translate strategy into scalable engineering outcomes.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in SRE, Observability, or platform infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with observability tools and stacks.
• Deep understanding of SLIs, SLOs, and telemetry best practices.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot integration issues across hybrid environments.

Responsibilities

• Define the roadmap for engineering enablers for Project Orion aligned with reliability goals.
• Translate organization strategy into deliverables with Services Products, Operations & Engineering.
• Understand critical business services and translate into End-to-End monitoring solutions.
• Deliver observability roadmap by building scalable telemetry components and dashboards.
• Review and reduce TOIL by improving monitoring and alerting processes.
• Create dashboards and visualizations for real‑time payment flows and client journeys.
• Guide lines-of-business teams in implementing SLIs/SLOs and effective alerts.

Skills

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

SLIs/SLOs

Dashboards

AI/ML capabilities

Cross-functional collaboration

Observability best practices

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

ELK

Splunk

Job description

The SRE Observability Specialist is a hands‑on expert, delivering the future of Observability across Services Technology. This role is a part of a central SRE enablement team within Services Production, working closely with SREs, developers, and platform teams to embed telemetry, implement SLOs, and build meaningful visualizations for key production flows — particularly in critical Payments Business.

The ideal candidate will have deep technical knowledge, a collaborative mindset, and the ability to translate strategy into scalable engineering outcomes. You will also act as a bridge between Services Technology teams and central infrastructure/CTO teams, prioritizing observability needs from line‑of‑business teams and driving improvements. A strong understanding of observability tooling, evolving AI/ML capabilities, and enterprise tooling ecosystems will be essential.

This role requires providing technological Support solution for Function called Project Orion which provides End‑to‑End payment monitoring like Building an End‑to‑End payments Dashboard, Toil Reduction, Transformation of legacy monitoring into observability based monitoring solution, requires good understanding of different Payments Taxonomy (ACH, Wires, Instant Payments, etc.). Strong commercial awareness, technical credibility, and excellent communication skills are essential to negotiate internally, influence peers, and drive change. Some external communication may be necessary.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define the roadmap for Engineering enablers for Project Orion team aligned with enterprise reliability and SRE Services organization goals.
• Translate Organization strategy into an actionable delivery plan in partnership with Services Products, Operations & Engineering function, delivering incremental, high‑value milestones.
• Understand Critical Business Services functional scope and translate into End‑to‑End monitoring solutions.
• Deliver against the observability roadmap for Services Technology by building scalable, reusable telemetry solutions.
• Periodic review and analyze application monitoring TOIL and collaborate with stakeholders and remediate them as per organization goal.
• Create and maintain dashboards and visualizations for critical client journeys, including real‑time flows across Payments.
• Guide line‑of‑business teams in implementing SLIs/SLOs, golden signals, and effective alerting to support operational excellence.
• Support integration and adoption of observability tooling across on‑prem, public cloud (AWS/GCP), and containerized environments (ECS, Kubernetes).
• Customize shared dashboards and observability components in partnership with CTI and other central Engineering functions, ensuring usability and flexibility.
• Provide technical support and implementation guidance to SREs and developers facing integration or tooling challenges.
• Effectively manage the observability book of work for Services Technology and drive initiatives to reduce MTTD and improve recovery outcomes.
• Serve as a key connection point between line‑of‑business SREs and central infrastructure functions by gathering tooling feedback, surfacing systemic issues, and influencing platform enhancements via the Services Observability Forum.
• Stay current with observability trends, including AI/ML‑driven insights, anomaly detection, and emerging OSS practices, and assess their applicability.
• Maintain strong knowledge of observability platform features and vendor offerings to advise teams and maximize the value of tooling investments.
• Foster AI adoption by building use cases performed by Orion L1 Functions and remediation using Citi AI tech stack.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience in SRE, Observability Engineering, or platform infrastructure roles focused on operational telemetry.
• Hands‑on experience in observability tools and stacks such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ELK, Splunk, and similar platforms.
• Deep understanding of SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, and telemetry best practices in high‑availability environments.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot integration issues and support observability across hybrid platforms (on‑prem, cloud, containers).
• Experience building dashboards aligned to business outcomes and incident workflows, especially in critical flows like payments.
• Familiarity with modern observability tooling ecosystems, including AI/ML capabilities, trace correlation, baselining, and alert tuning.
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills — able to operate across federated engineering teams and central infrastructure groups.
• Experience in enablement or platform teams with a track record of scaling best practices across diverse business units.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Job Family Group:

Technology

Job Family:

Applications Support

Time Type:

Full time

Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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