Senior Observability Architect & AIOps Leader

Backblaze External Website; United States; Remote; USD 178,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Backblaze is seeking a senior Observability Platform Architect to own the technical direction for detecting, correlating, and responding to infrastructure incidents across data centers.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-enabled automation in operations, and set standards for metrics, logs, and traces across the platform. This role emphasizes architecture ownership and scalable observability in a distributed system landscape.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in a systems engineering, SRE, DevOps, or observability-focused role
• Deep hands-on experience with Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or equivalent metrics platforms
• Experience designing and operating log aggregation pipelines such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Logstash, Filebeat
• Working knowledge of distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry)
• Proficiency in Python and/or Go for automation and tooling
• Experience with Kubernetes, including deploying workloads and understanding pod networking and storage
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling and configuration management
• Strong understanding of Linux internals, Debian/Ubuntu preferred
• Mentored engineers and raised technical bar on a team
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and standards for observability across the organization, including instrumentation conventions, alerting philosophy, and dashboard design patterns.
• Mentor engineers on the Observability team and act as a technical resource for SRE, Storage Engineering, and Network Engineering on observability practice.
• Lead design reviews for observability work and represent the team in cross-functional architecture discussions.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions for observability and AIOps tooling, including data sovereignty and compliance considerations.
• Produce and maintain design documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records that make the platform operable and extensible by future contributors.
• Own and evolve our metrics pipeline across data centers, including VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, and service discovery layer; expand logging and tracing; define Grafana standards.
• Define capacity and retention strategy for telemetry stack as fleet grows.
• Write and review automated playbooks for configuration management and automation on Debian-based servers.
• Partner with SRE on Consul-based service discovery for VictoriaMetrics automation.
• Lead Ceph storage observability and integration with alerting.
• Collaborate with Network Engineering on BGP, routing, and network observability.
• Drive expansion of internal telemetry in partnership with application teams.

Skills

Prometheus

VictoriaMetrics

OpenTelemetry

Python

Go

Kubernetes

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

Leadership / Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Logstash

Filebeat

Jaeger

Grafana

Consul

Job description

Backblaze is seeking a senior Observability Platform Architect to own the technical direction for detecting, correlating, and responding to infrastructure incidents across data centers.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-enabled automation in operations, and set standards for metrics, logs, and traces across the platform. This role emphasizes architecture ownership and scalable observability in a distributed system landscape.