Reliability Engineer 4 (Observability Specialist )

Us Bank; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 124,000 - 146,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

Retirement plan

Paid vacation

Holiday opportunities

Parental leave

Job summary

U.S. Bank is seeking a senior Reliability Engineer specializing in observability to partner with product owners, SREs, and engineering teams to translate customer journeys into measurable reliability objectives and to establish governance for dashboards, SLIs, SLOs, and telemetry.

You will lead instrumentation standards, monitoring strategies, alerting models, and executive dashboards, while mentoring teams in tracing, logging, metrics, and synthetic tests.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience.
• Six to eight years of relevant work experience in IT Service Management, production support, or application development.
• Strong knowledge of SLIs, SLOs, and reliability metrics.

Responsibilities

• Lead observability across critical customer journeys to align strategy with outcomes.
• Define and govern SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets and reliability metrics.
• Establish governance for dashboards, alerts, synthetic monitoring and telemetry.
• Translate product and engineering requirements into actionable observability designs.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to ensure production readiness and instrumentation.
• Develop dashboards communicating service health, availability and latency.
• Mentor teams on distributed tracing, logging, metrics and alert governance.

Skills

Observability

SRE

Tracing

Logging

Metrics collection

Alerting

Stakeholder mgmt

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Datadog

Dynatrace

Grafana

Prometheus

New Relic

OpenTelemetry

Job description

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions, enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed in the right ways, all more confidently and more often—that’s what we call the courage to thrive. We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Bank, Elavon is committed to building the platforms and ecosystems that help over 1.5 million customers around the world to achieve their financial goals—no matter what they need. From transaction processing to customer service, to driving innovation and launching new products, we’re building a range of tailored payment solutions powered by the latest technology. As part of our team, you can explore what motivates and energizes your career goals: partnering with our customers, our communities, and each other.

Job Description

Responsibilities

As a senior-level Reliability Engineer specializing in observability, this role partners closely with product owners, application engineering teams, SRE teams, and business stakeholders to translate customer journeys and business outcomes into measurable reliability objectives. The role establishes and maintains best-practice processes for documenting, governing, reviewing, and improving user journeys, SLIs, SLOs, synthetic monitoring, dashboards, alerts, telemetry standards, and related observability assets. The engineer provides senior technical guidance, identifies observability gaps through incident and performance analysis, drives continuous improvement, and helps ensure teams have the data, processes, and operating discipline needed to detect issues earlier, reduce customer impact, and improve overall service reliability.

• Lead the definition, documentation, implementation, and continuous improvement of Observability across Critical Customer Journeys, ensuring alignment between Observability Strategy, business outcomes, and reliability objectives.

• Design, implement, and govern Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Error Budgets, and reliability metrics for enterprise applications and services.

• Establish and maintain Observability Governance Frameworks for Dashboards, Alerts, Synthetic Monitoring, Telemetry Standards, and lifecycle management of observability assets.

• Translate business and technical requirements into scalable Observability Architectures, including Instrumentation Standards, Monitoring Strategies, Tagging Frameworks, and Alerting Models.

• Partner with Product Owners, Application Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Operations Teams to ensure applications are production-ready and fully instrumented for reliability measurement.

• Develop and maintain executive and operational Service Health Dashboards that provide insights into Availability, Latency, Customer Impact, Dependency Performance, and SLO Compliance.

• Analyze Telemetry Data, Incident Trends, Problem Records, and Alert Performance to identify observability gaps, reduce alert fatigue, and improve detection accuracy.

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship on Distributed Tracing, Logging, Metrics Collection, Synthetic Testing, Application Performance Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, Monitoring Design Patterns, and Alert Governance Best Practices.

• Lead the definition, documentation, and ongoing refinement of critical user journeys in partnership with product owners, engineering teams, SRE, operations, and business stakeholders to ensure observability practices are aligned to customer experience, business outcomes, and operational risk.

• Define, document, and govern appropriate service-level indicators and service-level objectives for applications and key capabilities, including availability, latency, error rate, throughput, dependency health, and other measurements that reflect meaningful customer and business impact.

• Establish and maintain a best-practice process for identifying, approving, implementing, reviewing, and retiring user journeys, SLIs, SLOs, dashboards, monitors, synthetic tests, alerts, and related observability artifacts.

• Translate product and engineering requirements into actionable observability designs that specify telemetry needs, measurement methods, tagging standards, dashboard requirements, alerting thresholds, ownership, evidence expectations, and operational runbook linkages.

• Partner with product and engineering teams during design, build, release, and production-readiness activities to ensure applications are instrumented to validate critical customer journeys, measure reliability outcomes, and support effective incident detection and triage.

• Develop, maintain, and continuously improve dashboards and reporting that communicate service health, SLO performance, error-budget posture, customer impact, dependency performance, alert effectiveness, and trends to technical teams and leadership stakeholders.

• Analyze telemetry, incidents, problem records, alert history, customer-impacting events, and SLO performance trends to identify observability gaps, reduce alert noise, improve detection accuracy, and recommend reliability improvements.

• Provide senior-level guidance, coaching, and standards interpretation to engineering, SRE, and operations teams on observability design patterns, SLI/SLO selection, customer journey monitoring, synthetic monitoring, logging, tracing, metrics, and alert governance.

• Maintain an authoritative inventory of observability assets, including user journeys, SLIs, SLOs, dashboards, monitors, alerts, synthetic tests, ownership assignments, review cadence, and evidence of ongoing compliance with approved observability standards.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience

• Six to eight years of relevant work experience in business and risk analysis, IT Service Management, production support, product/project management, or application development

Preferred Skills/Experience

• Expertise in Observability Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Reliability Engineering.

• Strong knowledge of SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, and Customer Journey Monitoring.

• Demonstrated ability to understand stakeholder needs and guide the development of reliability requirements for large, complex multi-system products.

• Hands‑on experience with APM, RUM, synthetics, monitoring, logging, tracing, and telemetry frameworks.

• Proficiency with Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic, Elastic, or OpenTelemetry.

• Experience building, standardizing, and tuning operational dashboards and actionable alerts that communicate service health, customer impact, dependency health, performance trends, failure conditions, severity, ownership, routing, and runbook linkage.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, cloud platforms, and Kubernetes.

• Ability to leverage incident analysis, RCA, and performance data to drive reliability improvements.

• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and technical leadership skills.

Location expectations

This role requires working from a U.S. Bank location three (3) or more days per week.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate a disability during any portion of the application or hiring process, please refer to our disability accommodations for applicants.

Benefits:

Our approach to benefits and total rewards considers our team members’ whole selves and what may be needed to thrive in and outside work. That's why our benefits are designed to help you and your family boost your health, protect your financial security and give you peace of mind. Our benefits include the following:

• Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)

• Basic term and optional term life insurance

• Short-term and long-term disability

• Pregnancy disability and parental leave

• 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan

• Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)

• Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities

• Adoption assistance

• Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law

Review our full benefits available by employment status here.

U.S. Bank is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, religion, color, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or veteran status, and other factors protected under applicable law.

U.S. Bank participates in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security E-Verify program in all facilities located in the United States and certain U.S. territories. The E-Verify program is an Internet-based employment eligibility verification system operated by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Learn more about the E-Verify program.

The salary range reflects figures based on the primary location, which is listed first. The actual range for the role may differ based on the location of the role. In addition to salary, U.S. Bank offers a comprehensive benefits package, including incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase 401(k) contribution and pension (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Pay Range: $124,355.00 - $146,300.00

U.S. Bank will consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records for employment. U.S. Bank conducts background checks consistent with applicable local laws, including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance and the California Fair Chance Act as well as the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. U.S. Bank is subject to, and conducts background checks consistent with the requirements of Section 19 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (FDIA). In addition, certain positions may also be subject to the requirements of FINRA, NMLS registration, Reg Z, Reg G, OFAC, the NFA, the FCPA, the Bank Secrecy Act, the SAFE Act, and/or federal guidelines applicable to an agreement, such as those related to ethics, safety, or operational procedures.

Applicants must be able to comply with U.S. Bank policies and procedures including the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct and related workplace conduct and safety policies.

Posting may be closed earlier due to high volume of applicants.