Remote Chief Architect, Observability Strategy

Merck; Oklahoma; On-site; USD 142,000 - 224,000; Full time

Job summary

Merck is seeking a Principal Engineer for Observability to define and drive a unified, full-stack observability framework across product teams. You will lead strategy, architecture, and the adoption of self-service tooling to improve reliability, performance, and resilience at scale.

You will partner with SRE and engineering leaders, champion OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and stay on the cutting edge with technologies like eBPF and multi-cloud designs to deliver measurable business value.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in Observability, software engineering, SRE, or platform engineering.
• Subject matter expert on observability telemetry and tooling.
• Experience architecting large-scale technical solutions.
• Proven leadership across teams or an organization.
• Deep knowledge of SRE principles, defining and managing SLOs.
• OpenTelemetry proficiency for instrumentation and telemetry collection.
• Experience across multiple cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP).

Responsibilities

• Create unified, long-term observability strategy for the company.
• Architect a cohesive, full-stack observability solution with self-service.
• Drive standardization and consolidate tooling to reduce costs.
• Partner with SRE to define, measure, and manage SLOs and error budgets.
• Communicate complex topics clearly to senior leadership and stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers on instrumentation, monitoring, and incident analysis.
• Stay updated on industry trends (eBPF, OpenTelemetry) and best practices.

Skills

Observability leadership

OpenTelemetry expertise

SRE & SLO mastery

Multi-cloud experience

Communication & influence

Instrumentation & AIOps

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

Dynatrace

Job description

Merck is seeking a Principal Engineer for Observability to define and drive a unified, full-stack observability framework across product teams. You will lead strategy, architecture, and the adoption of self-service tooling to improve reliability, performance, and resilience at scale.

You will partner with SRE and engineering leaders, champion OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and stay on the cutting edge with technologies like eBPF and multi-cloud designs to deliver measurable business value.