Senior Observability Platform Engineer — AI-Driven

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

Job summary

Backblaze is seeking a senior observability-focused individual contributor to set the technical direction for how we detect, correlate, and respond to infrastructure incidents across our data centers. You will mentor engineers and influence architecture as the platform matures, with a focus on AI-driven automation.

You will own metrics, logging, and tracing, expand dashboards, and guide cross-functional teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in a systems engineering, SRE, DevOps, or observability-focused role with leadership.
• Hands-on experience with Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics at scale, including PromQL and Alertmanager.
• Experience designing and operating log aggregation pipelines (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Logstash, Filebeat).
• Knowledge of distributed tracing (Jaeger/OpenTelemetry).
• Proficiency in Python and/or Go for automation and tooling.
• Experience with Kubernetes, including deployment, pod networking, and storage.
• Infrastructure-as-code tooling and configuration management experience.
• Strong Linux knowledge (Debian/Ubuntu).
• Demonstrated mentoring and raising the technical bar on teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication across engineering, SRE, security, and leadership.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for observability standards, including instrumentation, alerting, and dashboards.
• Mentor Observability team; advise SRE, Storage and Network Eng on observability.
• Lead design reviews for observability work and participate in cross-functional architecture decisions.
• Evaluate build-vs-buy for observability and AIOps tooling, with data sovereignty considerations.
• Produce and maintain design docs, runbooks, and ADRs for operability and extensibility.

Skills

Observability leadership

Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Jaeger/OpenTelemetry

Python/Go automation

Kubernetes

Infrastructure as code

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

Mentoring engineers

Communication skills

Tools

Grafana

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Logstash

Filebeat

VictoriaMetrics

Jaeger

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Backblaze is seeking a senior observability-focused individual contributor to set the technical direction for how we detect, correlate, and respond to infrastructure incidents across our data centers. You will mentor engineers and influence architecture as the platform matures, with a focus on AI-driven automation.

You will own metrics, logging, and tracing, expand dashboards, and guide cross-functional teams.