Senior Engineering Manager, Observability Engineering

Temporal Technologies • Seattle, WA

1d • $220,000 - $362,000

About The Position

Temporal is seeking a senior engineering leader to own observability for its multi-tenant, multi-cloud platform. The role covers both the internal telemetry platform used by engineers to operate Temporal Cloud and customer-facing observability features that help customers debug their workflows. The successful candidate will bring experience operating observability at scale, treating telemetry cost and cardinality as core engineering constraints, and maintaining strong operational practices on a reliability-focused platform.

The position owns the observability roadmap and the ingestion, storage, query, and visualization path for high-cardinality telemetry. It also leads a high-ownership engineering team, oversees alerting and incident-response tooling, and partners with Product and SDK teams to shape customer-facing metrics, traces, and workflow diagnostics. The role is accountable for observability economics, including cost and capacity, and works across Engineering, Product, Security, and Support to deliver shared outcomes.

Requirements

• Proven experience leading engineering teams that build and operate observability, monitoring, or telemetry platforms at scale, with strong operational practices.
• 15+ years in software and/or infrastructure engineering, including 7+ years of people management, with ownership of delivery and live-site outcomes.
• Experience hiring, leveling, coaching, and performance-managing engineers.
• Strong distributed-systems expertise and hands-on judgment to guide architecture and execution.
• Experience operating multi-tenant infrastructure that other people’s production workloads depend on.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to partner across engineering, product, and leadership and translate customer feedback into a roadmap.
• Strong leadership and coaching skills; ability to build a healthy, accountable, high-ownership team, including through reorgs, acquisitions, or platform migrations.
• Ability to set priorities and deliver incremental improvements with incomplete information, make tradeoffs explicit, and adapt plans to changing customer and operational needs.
• Command of observability building blocks, including metrics, logs, traces, profiling, and alerting, and their tradeoffs at scale.
• Knowledge of time-series and telemetry data fundamentals, including cardinality control, retention and downsampling, query performance, and hot/cold storage tiering.
• Live-site reliability expertise, including SLA/SLO definition, on-call, incident management, and postmortem-driven continuous improvement.
• Ability to review and raise the bar on technical artifacts, including design documents and code reviews, across a distributed-systems codebase.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree.
• Experience applying AI/LLM techniques to triage, anomaly detection, or incident summarization, with sound judgment about their limitations.
• Deep OpenTelemetry experience, including collector architecture, semantic conventions, and instrumentation strategy.
• Production experience with open-source observability tools such as Prometheus, Mimir, Thanos, Cortex, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, or ClickHouse.
• Experience building observability as a product for external developers, not only as internal tooling.
• Kubernetes internals expertise and multi-cloud delivery across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• Experience leading vendor consolidation or migration programs between commercial APM/SaaS and open-source tools, with measurable cost and reliability outcomes.
• Developer experience or engineering productivity background, 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the observability team’s technical roadmap and delivery, aligned with broader engineering priorities; evaluate build, buy, and open-source options while balancing reliability, customer needs, and cost.
• Lead, hire, and grow a high-ownership engineering team; guide technical decisions through design and code reviews, coach engineers, and remove delivery friction.
• Own ingestion, storage, query, and visualization for high-cardinality telemetry across a multi-tenant, multi-cloud fleet, enabling self-service capabilities for a growing Engineering organization.
• Own alerting and incident-response tooling end to end; improve detection quality, routing, actionable runbooks, on-call sustainability, and reliability through incident reviews.
• Partner with Product and SDK teams on customer-facing metrics, traces, and workflow-level diagnostics; work with design-partner customers and incorporate feedback into the roadmap.
• Manage observability unit economics, including costs per ingested series, query, and namespace; set cardinality budgets, consolidate tools where appropriate, and manage vendor relationships against 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.

What This Job Offers

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