SRE Observability Specialist - Vice President

Citi; New York (NY); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Citi is seeking an SRE Observability Specialist (Vice President) to lead the observability strategy for Payments and core services. You will partner with SREs, developers, and platform teams to embed telemetry, define SLOs, and build scalable visualizations across critical production flows.

The role requires deep expertise in observability tools and telemetry best practices, with strong collaboration and communication to influence across federated teams and leadership.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in SRE, Observability Engineering, or platform infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ELK, and Splunk.
• Deep knowledge of SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and telemetry best practices.
• Experience troubleshooting integrations across on-prem, cloud, and containers.
• Experience building dashboards tied to business outcomes, especially payments.
• Familiarity with AI/ML in observability and modern tooling.
• Strong collaboration across federated teams.
• Experience in enablement or platform teams scaling practices.

Responsibilities

• Define the roadmap for engineering enablers for Project Orion team.
• Translate strategy into delivery plan with Services Products, Operations & Engineering.
• Develop end-to-end monitoring for critical business services.
• Deliver observability roadmap with scalable telemetry.
• Review and reduce TOIL in monitoring and remediate.
• Create dashboards for critical client journeys, real-time payments.
• Guide LOB teams in implementing SLIs/SLOs and alerts.
• Support integration of observability tooling across on-prem, AWS/GCP, and containers (ECS, Kubernetes).
• Customize dashboards with CTI and central Engineering functions.
• Provide technical guidance to SREs and developers.
• Manage observability work and drive MTTR improvements.
• Bridge between line-of-business SREs and central infrastructure functions.
• Stay current with trends including AI/ML, anomaly detection, and OSS practices.
• Maintain knowledge of platform features and vendor offerings.
• Foster AI adoption by building use cases with Orion L1 Functions.

Skills

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

ELK

Splunk

SRE

Observability

Dashboards

SLIs/SLOs

Cloud AWS/GCP

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

GCP

Kubernetes

ECS

Job description

SRE Observability Specialist - Vice President

Working at Citi is far more than just a job. A career with us means joining a team of approximately 219,000 dedicated people from around the globe. At Citi, you’ll have the opportunity to grow your career, give back to your community and make a real impact.

Job Overview

The SRE Observability Specialist is a hands-on expert, delivering the future of Observability across Services Technology. This role is a part of a central SRE enablement team within Services Production, working closely with SREs, developers, and platform teams to embed telemetry, implement SLOs, and build meaningful visualizations for key production flows — particularly in critical Payments Business.

The ideal candidate will have deep technical knowledge, a collaborative mindset, and the ability to translate strategy into scalable engineering outcomes. You will also act as a bridge between Services Technology teams and central infrastructure/CTO teams, prioritising observability needs from line-of-business teams and driving improvements. A strong understanding of observability tooling, evolving AI/ML capabilities, and enterprise tooling ecosystems will be essential.

This role requires providing technological Support solution for Function called Project Orion which provides End-to-End payment monitoring like Building an End-to-End payments Dashboard, Toil Reduction, Transformation of legacy monitoring into observability based monitoring solution, requires good understanding of different Payments Taxonomy (ACH, Wires, Instant Payments, etc.). Strong commercial awareness, technical credibility, and excellent communication skills are essential to negotiate internally, influence peers, and drive change. Some external communication may be necessary.

Key Responsibilities

• Define the roadmap for Engineering enablers for Project Orion team aligned with enterprise reliability and SRE Services organization goals.
• Translate Organization strategy into an actionable delivery plan in partnership with Services Products, Operations & Engineering function, delivering incremental, high-value milestones.
• Understand Critical Business Services functional scope and translate into End-to-End monitoring solutions.
• Deliver against the observability roadmap for Services Technology by building scalable, reusable telemetry solutions.
• Periodic review and analyze application monitoring TOIL and collaborate with stakeholders and remediate them as per organization goal.
• Create and maintain dashboards and visualizations for critical client journeys, including real-time flows across Payments.
• Guide line-of-business teams in implementing SLIs/SLOs, golden signals, and effective alerting to support operational excellence.
• Support integration and adoption of observability tooling across on-prem, public cloud (AWS/GCP), and containerized environments (ECS, Kubernetes).
• Customize shared dashboards and observability components in partnership with CTI and other central Engineering functions, ensuring usability and flexibility.
• Provide technical support and implementation guidance to SREs and developers facing integration or tooling challenges.
• Effectively manage the observability book of work for Services Technology and drive initiatives to reduce MTTD and improve recovery outcomes.
• Serve as a key connection point between line-of-business SREs and central infrastructure functions by gathering tooling feedback, surfacing systemic issues, and influencing platform enhancements via the Services Observability Forum.
• Stay current with observability trends, including AI/ML-driven insights, anomaly detection, and emerging OSS practices, and assess their applicability.
• Maintain strong knowledge of observability platform features and vendor offerings to advise teams and maximize the value of tooling investments.
• Foster AI adoption by building use cases performed by Orion L1 Functions and remediation using Citi AI tech stack.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in SRE, Observability Engineering, or platform infrastructure roles focused on operational telemetry.
• Hands-on experience in observability tools and stacks such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ELK, Splunk, and similar platforms.
• Deep understanding of SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, and telemetry best practices in high-availability environments.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot integration issues and support observability across hybrid platforms (on-prem, cloud, containers).
• Experience building dashboards aligned to business outcomes and incident workflows, especially in critical flows like payments.
• Familiarity with modern observability tooling ecosystems, including AI/ML capabilities, trace correlation, baselining, and alert tuning.
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills — able to operate across federated engineering teams and central infrastructure groups.
• Experience in enablement or platform teams with a track record of scaling best practices across diverse business units.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Job Family Group

Technology

Job Family

Applications Support

Time Type

Full time

Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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