Senior Observability Engineer | Hybrid & Dashboards

Verisign; Reston (VA); Hybrid; USD 164,000 - 222,000; Full time

Job summary

Verisign in Reston, VA is seeking a Senior Observability Engineer to design and advance observability capabilities. The role focuses on creating unified dashboards and services that translate technical performance into business insights.

You will establish SLIs/SLOs, automate data collection, and craft executive-ready health views. Hybrid work in Reston with a strong emphasis on cross-team collaboration and strategic metrics.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in observability engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, production operations, or related discipline.
• Hands-on experience with enterprise observability platforms such as Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Nagios, Kafka, or comparable technologies.
• Demonstrated experience defining and implementing application SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and service-health measurements.
• Strong experience analyzing metrics, logs, traces, events, and application-performance data.
• Experience designing dashboards for both technical teams and executive decision makers.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud platforms, microservices, containers, APIs, and application dependencies.
• Experience with telemetry instrumentation and standards.
• Proficiency with data-querying or analytical languages.
• Experience automating observability configurations through APIs, scripting, infrastructure as code, or CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, visualization, and communication skills.
• Ability to translate technical findings into business impact, risk, and recommended action.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain unified observability dashboards that consolidate metrics, logs, traces, events, and application/system data for Architecture and Infrastructure environments.
• Develop executive-level views of service health, availability, performance, customer impact, operational risk, and capacity trends.
• Translate complex technical data into clear insights that support prioritization, risk management, and operational decisions.
• Define dashboard standards that provide consistent terminology, visualizations, service hierarchies, and health indicators.
• Ensure dashboards emphasize actionable signals and trends rather than large telemetry volumes.
• Partner with application owners, product teams, and business stakeholders to define meaningful SLIs and SLOs.
• Establish indicators for availability, latency, throughput, error rates, data quality, user experience, and critical business transactions.
• Develop error-budget policies and reporting to balance reliability, risk, and delivery speed.
• Standardize SLO definitions, measurement methods, ownership, and governance across applications.
• Automate collection, calculation, visualization, and reporting of SLO performance.
• Identify services lacking adequate monitoring and develop plans to close gaps.
• Analyze observability data to identify performance degradation, reliability risks, recurring incidents, capacity constraints, and trends.
• Correlate telemetry with customer experience and business outcomes.
• Develop health scores, trend analyses, anomaly detection, and predictive indicators.
• Perform deep-dive analyses to determine root causes behind incidents and degradation.
• Produce concise operational insights and recommendations for executive and technical audiences.
• Measure effectiveness of observability investments via reduced detection time, faster recovery, fewer incidents, and improved SLO attainment.
• Serve as a senior technical authority for observability, monitoring, and reliability measurement.
• Develop observability strategies, standards, roadmaps, and adoption models.
• Collaborate with executives, architects, teams, SREs, security, and operations leaders.
• Coach teams on instrumentation, dashboard design, SLO development, and data-driven problem-solving.
• Lead evaluations and recommendations on observability platforms and capabilities.
• Promote data-driven decisions tied to service performance and customer impact.

Skills

Observability engineering

SRE

Data analysis

Dashboard design

Leadership

Tools

Splunk

Grafana

Prometheus

ELK

Nagios

Kafka

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Verisign in Reston, VA is seeking a Senior Observability Engineer to design and advance observability capabilities. The role focuses on creating unified dashboards and services that translate technical performance into business insights.

You will establish SLIs/SLOs, automate data collection, and craft executive-ready health views. Hybrid work in Reston with a strong emphasis on cross-team collaboration and strategic metrics.