Associate Director, Technical Architecture

MSD • Rahway, NJ

1d • $142,400 - $224,100 • Remote

About The Position

We are seeking a visionary and influential technical leader to join as a Principal Engineer for Observability. In this role, you will be the chief architect and evangelist for our company-wide observability strategy. Your mission is to define and drive the adoption of a unified, full-stack observability framework that empowers our product teams to build and operate highly reliable, performant, and resilient services.
This is not just a technical role; it is a strategic one. You will work across organizational boundaries, from engineering teams to senior leadership, to champion a culture of operational excellence. You will be responsible for rationalizing our tooling landscape, eliminating redundancy, and designing a cohesive, self-service observability platform that is easy to consume. If you are passionate about turning complex technical concepts into clear business value and leading large-scale change, this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree
• 10+ years in Observability, software engineering, SRE, or platform engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and implementing large-scale technical solutions.
• Subject matter expert on Observability practices and collection of all types of telemetry. SME for the tools that support them (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace, BigPanda, xMatters or others).
• Demonstrable experience creating and executing a technical strategy across multiple teams or an entire organization.
• Deep, practical knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering principles, with hands-on experience defining, implementing, and managing SLOs and error budgets.
• Strong understanding and practical experience with the OpenTelemetry standard for instrumentation and telemetry collection.
• Experience designing solutions that operate across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• World-class ability to explain highly complex technical concepts to senior executives and non-technical audiences. Proven ability to lead by influence and drive consensus in a large organization.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading projects to consolidate tooling and migrate teams to a centralized platform.
• Understanding of cloud cost management principles and how they apply to observability data and tooling.
• Familiarity with eBPF for advanced, low-level system observability and performance analysis.
• Experience thinking about internal platforms as products, with a focus on user experience, self-service, and clear documentation.

Responsibilities

• Create, document, and champion a unified, long-term observability strategy for the entire company, covering all telemetry types like metrics, traces, logs, profiles and more.
• Design a cohesive, full-stack observability solution using best-in-class tools and practices. Ensure our architecture promotes a product-oriented approach with a strong focus on self-service capabilities.
• Actively identify and help decommission redundant or overlapping tools, driving the organization towards a standardized, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage observability service.
• Partner with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, promote their principles, such as defining, measuring, and managing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets and how critical Observability for them.
• Clearly and persuasively communicate complex observability topics, benefits, and strategic decisions to senior leadership and stakeholders across IT and business domains.
• Act as the senior technical expert and thought leader in the observability space. Mentor engineers and guide teams in implementing best practices for instrumentation (OpenTelemetry), monitoring, and incident analysis using AIOps.
• Continuously research industry trends, emerging technologies (like eBPF, OpenTelemetry), and best practices to ensure our observability strategy remains modern and effective.

Benefits

• medical, dental, vision healthcare and other insurance benefits (for employee and family)
• retirement benefits, including 401(k)
• paid holidays
• vacation
• compassionate and sick days
• annual bonus
• long-term incentive

What This Job Offers

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