Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Temporal builds an open-source programming model and cloud platform for reliable application execution. The Senior Engineering Manager, Observability Engineering leads the internal telemetry platform and customer-facing observability product, with responsibility for the team, roadmap, reliability, and cost.
Responsibilities
- Observability roadmap: Own the team’s technical roadmap and delivery, aligned with broader engineering priorities. Evaluate build, buy, and open-source options, balancing reliability, customer needs, and cost
- Technical leadership: Lead, hire, and grow a high-ownership team of engineers. Guide technical decisions through design and code reviews. Coach engineers, help them grow, and clear the friction that slows them down
- Platform ownership: Own the ingestion, storage, query, and visualization path for high-cardinality telemetry across a multi-tenant, multi-cloud fleet. Enable self-serve capabilities to support a growing Engineering organization
- Operational excellence: Own alerting and incident response tooling end to end. Drive the detection quality, routing, and clear, actionable runbooks that make on-call sustainable, and turn incident reviews into lasting reliability improvements
- Customer-facing observability: Partner with Product and SDK teams on the telemetry Temporal exposes to customers: metrics, traces, and workflow-level diagnostics. Work directly with design-partner customers and integrate what you learn into the roadmap
- Cost, capacity & economics: Own the unit economics of observability: cost per ingested series, per query, per namespace. Set cardinality budgets, drive consolidation where tool sprawl has crept in, and negotiate and manage vendor relationships against clear value criteria
- Partner with Engineering, Product, Security, and Support to resolve competing priorities and deliver shared outcomes. Explain technical tradeoffs and risks clearly to senior leaders and non-specialist partners
Skills
- Proven experience leading engineering teams that build and operate observability, monitoring, or telemetry platforms at scale, with strong operational practices
- Demonstrated success leading engineering teams that build and operate production observability platforms, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and delivery
- 15+ years in software and/or infrastructure engineering, including 7+ years of people management, with demonstrated ownership of delivery and live-site outcomes
- Experience hiring, leveling, and performance management
- Strong distributed-systems expertise with the hands-on judgment to guide architecture and execution rather than guide it from a distance
- Experience operating multi-tenant infrastructure that other people's production workloads depend on
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to partner across engineering, product, and leadership and translate customer feedback into a roadmap
- Strong leadership and coaching; ability to grow engineers and build a healthy, accountable, high-ownership team, including through reorgs, acquisitions, or platform migrations
- Set priorities and deliver incremental improvements with incomplete information. Make tradeoffs explicit and adapt plans as customer and operational needs change
- Command of the observability building blocks — metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and alerting and the tradeoffs between them at scale
- Time-series and telemetry data fundamentals: cardinality control, retention and downsampling, query performance, and hot/cold storage tiering
- Live-site reliability craft: SLA/SLO definition, on-call, incident management, and postmortem-driven continuous improvement
- Ability to review and raise the bar on technical artifacts (design docs, code reviews) across a distributed-systems codebase
- Advanced degree a plus
- Applying AI/LLM techniques to triage, anomaly detection, or incident summarization, with clear-eyed judgment about where they help and where they don't
- OpenTelemetry at depth: collector architecture, semantic conventions, instrumentation strategy
- The open-source observability stack in production: Prometheus, Mimir/Thanos/Cortex, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, ClickHouse
- Building observability •as a product• for external developers, not only as internal tooling
- Kubernetes internals and multi-cloud delivery across AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Vendor consolidation or migration programs (commercial APM/SaaS to open-source, or the reverse) with measurable cost and reliability outcomes
- Developer experience or engineering productivity backgrounds - treating internal engineers as customers with a measurable experience
- Prior experience at a developer infrastructure or open-source-based company, where the community is part of the feedback loop
Benefits
- Offers equity
- Remote work in the United States
Company Overview
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