Principal Observability Engineer: Telemetry at Scale

Expedia Group; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 231,000 - 369,500; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Paid time off

Travel discounts

Job summary

Expedia Group is seeking aPrincipal Software Engineer in Observability to lead the architecture and delivery of a centralized observability platform used by all engineering teams. You will guide telemetry pipelines, OpenTelemetry adoption, and platform governance across our cloud-native stack.

You will mentor engineers, improve developer experience, and drive cost-efficient, scalable solutions with tools like Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, and OpenTelemetry.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on building and operating large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure automation, or configuration management
• Deep expertise in observability principles and the "three pillars": logs, metrics, and traces
• Strong hands-on proficiency with observability technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, and OpenTelemetry
• Proficient in one or more of: Go, Java, Python
• Solid understanding of cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices) and major cloud platforms (AWS preferred)

Responsibilities

• Architect and build core telemetry pipelines for logs, metrics, and traces to scale data volume 10x
• Drive OpenTelemetry adoption with automated configurations
• Implement governance, cost allocation, and SLOs for the observability platform
• Elevate observability practices by unifying tooling, docs, and service lifecycle
• Automate IaC using Terraform and Crossplane for cluster provisioning and upgrades
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers and architects
• Serve as final escalation point for production incidents related to observability
• Collaborate across teams using Go, Java, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, and OpenTelemetry

Skills

Go

Java

Python

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Splunk

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS

SLOs

Observability

Terraform

Crossplane

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Crossplane

Job description

Expedia Group is seeking aPrincipal Software Engineer in Observability to lead the architecture and delivery of a centralized observability platform used by all engineering teams. You will guide telemetry pipelines, OpenTelemetry adoption, and platform governance across our cloud-native stack.

You will mentor engineers, improve developer experience, and drive cost-efficient, scalable solutions with tools like Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, and OpenTelemetry.