Reliability Engineer 3 (Observability Specialist)

U.S. Bank • Brookfield, WI

8d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Reliability Observability Engineer 3 is responsible for enabling reliable, measurable, and supportable application operations across a broad portfolio of production applications. This role helps ensure application teams have actionable visibility into service health, customer experience, dependencies, performance, and failure conditions through effective use of metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, synthetic monitoring, and service-level indicators. As a senior-level Reliability Engineer specializing in observability, this role partners closely with product owners, application engineering teams, SRE teams, and business stakeholders to translate customer journeys and business outcomes into measurable reliability objectives. The role establishes and maintains best-practice processes for documenting, governing, reviewing, and improving user journeys, SLIs, SLOs, synthetic monitoring, dashboards, alerts, telemetry standards, and related observability assets. The engineer provides senior technical guidance, identifies observability gaps through incident and performance analysis, drives continuous improvement, and helps ensure teams have the data, processes, and operating discipline needed to detect issues earlier, reduce customer impact, and improve overall service reliability.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience
• Five to seven years of relevant work experience in business and risk analysis, IT Service Management, production support, product/project management, or application development

Nice To Haves

• Expertise in Observability Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Reliability Engineering.
• Strong knowledge of SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, and Customer Journey Monitoring.
• Demonstrated ability to understand stakeholder needs and guide the development of reliability requirements for large, complex multi-system products.
• Hands-on experience with APM, RUM, synthetics, monitoring, logging, tracing, and telemetry frameworks.
• Proficiency with Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic, Elastic, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience building, standardizing, and tuning operational dashboards and actionable alerts that communicate service health, customer impact, dependency health, performance trends, failure conditions, severity, ownership, routing, and runbook linkage.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, cloud platforms, and Kubernetes.
• Ability to leverage incident analysis, RCA, and performance data to drive reliability improvements.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and technical leadership skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead the definition, documentation, implementation, and continuous improvement of Observability across Critical Customer Journeys, ensuring alignment between Observability Strategy, business outcomes, and reliability objectives.
• Design, implement, and govern Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Error Budgets, and reliability metrics for enterprise applications and services.
• Establish and maintain Observability Governance Frameworks for Dashboards, Alerts, Synthetic Monitoring, Telemetry Standards, and lifecycle management of observability assets.
• Translate business and technical requirements into scalable Observability Architectures, including Instrumentation Standards, Monitoring Strategies, Tagging Frameworks, and Alerting Models.
• Partner with Product Owners, Application Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Operations Teams to ensure applications are production-ready and fully instrumented for reliability measurement.
• Develop and maintain executive and operational Service Health Dashboards that provide insights into Availability, Latency, Customer Impact, Dependency Performance, and SLO Compliance.
• Analyze Telemetry Data, Incident Trends, Problem Records, and Alert Performance to identify observability gaps, reduce alert fatigue, and improve detection accuracy.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship on Distributed Tracing, Logging, Metrics Collection, Synthetic Testing, Application Performance Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, Monitoring Design Patterns, and Alert Governance Best Practices.
• Lead the definition, documentation, and ongoing refinement of critical user journeys in partnership with product owners, engineering teams, SRE, operations, and business stakeholders to ensure observability practices are aligned to customer experience, business outcomes, and operational risk.
• Define, document, and govern appropriate service-level indicators and service-level objectives for applications and key capabilities, including availability, latency, error rate, throughput, dependency health, and other measurements that reflect meaningful customer and business impact.
• Establish and maintain a best-practice process for identifying, approving, implementing, reviewing, and retiring user journeys, SLIs, SLOs, dashboards, monitors, synthetic tests, alerts, and related observability artifacts.
• Translate product and engineering requirements into actionable observability designs that specify telemetry needs, measurement methods, tagging standards, dashboard requirements, alerting thresholds, ownership, evidence expectations, and operational runbook linkages.
• Partner with product and engineering teams during design, build, release, and production-readiness activities to ensure applications are instrumented to validate critical customer journeys, measure reliability outcomes, and support effective incident detection and triage.
• Develop, maintain, and continuously improve dashboards and reporting that communicate service health, SLO performance, error-budget posture, customer impact, dependency performance, alert effectiveness, and trends to technical teams and leadership stakeholders.
• Analyze telemetry, incidents, problem records, alert history, customer-impacting events, and SLO performance trends to identify observability gaps, reduce alert noise, improve detection accuracy, and recommend reliability improvements.
• Provide senior-level guidance, coaching, and standards interpretation to engineering, SRE, and operations teams on observability design patterns, SLI/SLO selection, customer journey monitoring, synthetic monitoring, logging, tracing, metrics, and alert governance.
• Maintain an authoritative inventory of observability assets, including user journeys, SLIs, SLOs, dashboards, monitors, alerts, synthetic tests, ownership assignments, review cadence, and evidence of ongoing compliance with approved observability standards.

Benefits

• Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)
• Basic term and optional term life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability
• Pregnancy disability and parental leave
• 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan
• Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)
• Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities
• Adoption assistance
• Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law

What This Job Offers

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