Observability and Performance Engineer

eTelligent Group • Columbia, WA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Observability and Performance Engineer helps the team identify operational and performance problems before they affect users. Working under the guidance of a senior operations lead, this role builds monitoring dashboards and alerts, establishes normal API performance profiles, and supports readiness for Filing Season traffic. The position is hybrid in the Washington, DC Metro Area, with work at IRS facilities and approved remote locations. U.S. citizenship is required, and the employee must be able to obtain and maintain an IRS Moderate Background Investigation (MBI)/Public Trust and meet IRS suitability and residency requirements.

Requirements

• 1 to 3 years of experience in monitoring, operations, site reliability, or performance testing.
• Experience with at least one monitoring or log tool, such as AppDynamics, ELK or Elastic, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, or Dynatrace.
• Understanding of HTTP, APIs, latency, throughput, and error rates.
• Basic Linux knowledge and scripting in Python or Bash.
• Clear writing skills for reports and incident notes.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to obtain and maintain an IRS Moderate Background Investigation (MBI); must meet IRS suitability and residency requirements.
• U.S. citizenship required.

Nice To Haves

• Load testing experience with a tool such as JMeter, k6, Gatling, or LoadRunner.
• Experience monitoring an API gateway or middleware platform.
• An AppDynamics, Elastic, or cloud certification.
• An active IRS MBI or prior IRS work.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain dashboards and alerts in AppDynamics and the ELK stack, and add Prometheus metrics for Kong.
• Establish a normal profile for each API, including volume, latency, and errors by hour and season, and tune alerts to detect drift while reducing noise.
• Help run a 60-day alert baseline intended to reduce auto-generated tickets seen by the IRS.
• Track certificate expiration dates and raise alerts 60, 30, and 14 days in advance.
• Collect performance data continuously, prepare weekly reviews, and support daily reviews during Filing Season.
• Help script and run load tests on webMethods and Kong before peak periods and migration waves.
• Pull logs and metrics to support incident triage and root cause analysis.
• Report monthly availability and performance against contract standards.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level