Operational Data & Observability Engineer

Nscale; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 145,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Flexible PTO

Parental leave

Retirement plan

Job summary

Nscale seeks an Operational Data & Observability Engineer to design and build observability capabilities across our production environments. You will work with DevOps, SRE, platform, and software teams to deliver modern monitoring, logging, and data pipelines that empower engineers with actionable insights.

You will implement distributed tracing, establish SLOs, and optimize the observability stack using Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, and related tools.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in DevOps, SRE, Operations, Platform, or Observability Engineering.
• Hands-on with modern monitoring platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic).
• Experience with centralized logging (ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk, CloudWatch).
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Bash, or similar scripting languages.
• Strong observability knowledge: metrics, logging, tracing, and APM.
• Experience with AWS/Azure/GCP and Kubernetes or comparable orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement enterprise observability strategies for infra, services, and apps.
• Develop dashboards, alerts, and SLOs to provide actionable visibility.
• Build and maintain centralized logging and log analysis pipelines.
• Implement distributed tracing across microservices and workflows.
• Establish baselines and anomaly detection for performance insights.
• Deploy, configure, and maintain metrics/logs/telemetry collection systems.
• Support on-call rotations and incident response efforts.
• Automate monitoring deployments and platform configuration; lifecycle mgmt.

Skills

DevOps / SRE experience

Observability fundamentals

Scripting (Python/Go/Bash)

Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP)

Kubernetes / container orchestration

Communication & documentation

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

ELK Stack

New Relic

CloudWatch

Terraform

Ansible

eBPF

Job description

About The Role

We're looking for an Operational Data & Observability Engineer to build and evolve the monitoring, logging, and observability capabilities that power our production environments. In this role, you'll help ensure our infrastructure and applications remain reliable, scalable, and performant by providing engineering teams with actionable operational insights.

You'll partner closely with DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), platform, and software engineering teams to develop modern observability solutions, improve incident response, and enable data-driven operational excellence.

What You'll Do

Design & Build Observability Solutions

• Design and implement enterprise observability strategies across infrastructure, services, and applications.
• Develop monitoring dashboards, alerts, and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) that provide meaningful operational visibility.
• Build and maintain centralized logging and log analysis pipelines.
• Implement distributed tracing to improve visibility across microservices and complex application workflows.
• Establish performance baselines and develop anomaly detection strategies.

Operational Data Engineering

• Deploy, configure, and maintain metrics, logs, events, and telemetry collection systems.
• Design and manage operational data pipelines that support monitoring and analytics.
• Develop APIs and integrations that enable operational data consumption across teams.
• Ensure data quality, consistency, retention, and cost-efficient storage practices.

Reliability & Operations

• Troubleshoot production issues using monitoring, logging, and tracing data.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and support incident response activities.
• Create and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and troubleshooting guides.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve platform reliability, scalability, and operational readiness.
• Continuously optimize observability infrastructure for performance and resilience.

Platform & Tool Administration

• Administer and enhance observability platforms such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK Stack, New Relic, or similar technologies.
• Evaluate emerging observability tools and recommend improvements.
• Automate monitoring deployments, instrumentation, and platform configuration.
• Perform ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and lifecycle management of observability infrastructure.

What You'll Bring

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Operations Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Observability Engineering.
• Hands-on experience with modern monitoring platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent.
• Experience working with centralized logging platforms including ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk, CloudWatch, or similar solutions.
• Proficiency with scripting or programming languages such as Python, Go, Bash, or equivalent.
• Strong understanding of observability fundamentals, including metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and application performance monitoring (APM).
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform) and Kubernetes or other container orchestration technologies.
• Solid understanding of application, infrastructure, networking, database, and storage performance monitoring.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills with a collaborative approach to problem-solving.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting microservices-based architectures.
• Expertise across multiple observability platforms.
• Experience with incident management, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Infrastructure as Code experience using Terraform, Ansible, or similar tools.
• Familiarity with eBPF or low-level Linux performance monitoring.
• Experience building custom telemetry, ETL, or operational data pipelines.
• Understanding of security monitoring, audit logging, and compliance requirements.

What Success Looks Like

• Improve platform visibility and operational health.
• Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) during incidents.
• Increase alert quality while reducing unnecessary noise.
• Deliver highly available, scalable observability platforms.
• Improve engineering productivity through actionable monitoring and operational insights.
• Optimize observability infrastructure performance and cost efficiency.

Work Environment

• Participate in a rotating on-call schedule to support production environments.
• Support mission-critical systems with occasional after-hours or incident response responsibilities.
• Hybrid or remote work arrangements available, depending on business needs.

Why Join Us?

You'll play a critical role in building the operational intelligence that keeps our platforms running at scale. If you're passionate about observability, automation, reliability, and empowering engineering teams with meaningful operational insights, we'd love to hear from you.

The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.

Salary Range: $145,000 USD - $180,000 USD

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