Ahead
Principal Observability & Reliability Architect
United States · Principal
Sponsorship not specified$180k-$240kDetected 271 days ago
Cloud PlatformsKubernetesCI/CDPrometheusGrafanaDatadogSite Reliability EngineeringKafkaIncident ResponseJiraLeadershipCommunicationMentoring
About the role
- We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.
- This is a senior, client-facing architecture and delivery leadership role focused on helping enterprise clients improve operational visibility, service reliability, incident response, telemetry governance, and business-service visibility.
Responsibilities
- Lead client discovery, architecture workshops, and solution design across observability, telemetry, reliability, and operational intelligence initiatives.
- Design enterprise observability architectures spanning monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, telemetry pipelines, alerting, event correlation, service visibility, and platform integrations.
- Lead modernization initiatives including tool rationalization, dashboard and alert rationalization, telemetry strategy, and migration from legacy monitoring platforms.
- Design integration patterns across ITSM, CMDB, event management, and automation platforms.
- Support pursuits by shaping solution strategy, validating scope, informing estimates, and building client-facing technical narratives.
- Build reusable reference architectures, playbooks, and accelerators while mentoring architects, consultants, and offshore teams.
- pursuit solutioning, discovery, architecture design, estimation, delivery governance, escalation, and practice enablement.
Requirements
- Strong knowledge of telemetry governance, including routing, transformation, normalization, enrichment, retention, access control, and cost management.
- Experience defining enterprise standards for dashboards, alerts, tagging, naming, service ownership, RBAC, and operating model adoption.
- Consulting or professional services experience with strong client-facing communication, estimation, risk management, and cross-functional leadership.
- 10+ years in observability, monitoring, APM, platform operations, SRE, or related enterprise technology domains, including 5+ years leading architecture and delivery strategy for enterprise observability or reliability initiatives.
- Deep, hands-on experience designing and implementing across monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, telemetry collection, and pipeline patterns in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Strong command of incident response, event correlation, alert strategy, service health, and business-service visibility, plus applied SRE concepts including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and production readiness.
- Ability to lead executive and technical workshops and translate business needs into actionable architecture and delivery plans.
Nice to have
- Platform experience such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, LogicMonitor, Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Elastic, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience with telemetry pipeline tools such as OpenTelemetry Collector, Grafana Alloy, Fluent Bit, Kafka, Cribl, or Vector, along with familiarity with cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
- Experience integrating with platforms such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, BigPanda, or xMatters.
- relevant cloud, SRE, ITIL, or FinOps certifications are a plus.
- These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment.
- You may opt-out of the review or analysis of your application and resume by AI tools by using the General Application.
- Please include the role you wish to apply for in the Additional Information field.
- You may also choose to opt-out of recording and transcription at any time, including after joining an interview.
Skills
- AHEAD builds platforms for digital business.
- AHEAD is seeking a Principal Observability & Reliability Architect to join AHEAD's Observability Practice within Intelligent Operations.
- Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans.
- Candidates will not be penalized for choosing to opt-out.
Compensation
- The compensation range indicated in this posting reflects the On-Target Earnings ("OTE") for this role, which includes a base salary and any applicable target bonus amount.
Benefits
- Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
- Paid parental and caregiver leave
- Plus more! See benefits https://www.aheadbenefits.com/ for additional details.
Visa & Work Authorization
- You may opt-out of the review or analysis of your application and resume by AI tools by using the General Application.
This listing is sourced directly from Ahead's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.