Senior Observability Engineer

Verisign•Reston, VA

2h•$164,300 - $222,300•Hybrid

About The Position

Verisign is seeking a Senior Observability Engineer to design and advance observability capabilities that turn operational data into actionable insight. The role will create unified dashboards that help executive decision makers, technology leaders, and application teams understand system health, service performance, customer impact, and operational risks. It combines deep observability engineering with data analysis, communication, and technical leadership. As part of the Architecture & Infrastructure Services (AIS) engineering and infrastructure team, this position strengthens operational insight and enables data-informed decisions. The engineer will improve observability to support the availability, reliability, and scalability of shared services infrastructure. The role works across engineering and executive audiences, translating technical findings into business-relevant insights and concise dashboards. The position is based in Verisign’s Reston, Virginia office and follows a hybrid work schedule. The pay range is $164,300–$222,300 annually. Base pay may vary based on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Verisign offers a discretionary bonus based on individual and company performance, and certain roles may be eligible for discretionary stock awards.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
10+ years of experience in observability engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, production operations, or a related discipline.
Hands-on experience with enterprise observability platforms such as Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Nagios, Kafka, or comparable technologies.
Demonstrated experience defining and implementing application SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and service-health measurements.
Strong experience analyzing metrics, logs, traces, events, and application-performance data.
Experience designing dashboards for technical teams and executive decision makers.
Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud platforms, microservices, containers, APIs, and application dependencies.
Experience with telemetry instrumentation and standards.
Proficiency with data-querying or analytical languages.
Experience automating observability configurations through APIs, scripting, infrastructure as code, or CI/CD pipelines.
Strong analytical, problem-solving, visualization, and communication skills.
Ability to translate technical findings into business impact, risk, and recommended action.

Nice To Haves

Experience establishing or modernizing an enterprise-wide observability program.
Experience integrating observability data with Jira, ServiceNow, or similar operational platforms.
Familiarity with reliability engineering, incident management, capacity planning, and FinOps practices.
Experience developing service maps, application health scores, executive scorecards, or predictive operational analytics.
Knowledge of statistical analysis and anomaly detection.
Expertise operating and troubleshooting container platforms such as Kubernetes and Docker.
Relevant cloud, observability, SRE, data analytics, or platform-engineering certifications.

Responsibilities

Design and maintain unified observability dashboards that consolidate metrics, logs, traces, events, and application and system data across Architecture and Infrastructure environments.
Develop executive-level views of service health, availability, performance, customer impact, operational risk, and capacity trends.
Translate technical data into clear insights that support prioritization, risk management, and operational decisions.
Define dashboard standards for terminology, visualizations, service hierarchies, and health indicators, emphasizing actionable signals and trends.
Partner with application owners, product teams, and business stakeholders to define meaningful SLIs and SLOs.
Establish indicators for availability, latency, throughput, error rates, data quality, user experience, and critical business transactions.
Develop error-budget policies and reporting to help teams balance reliability, risk, and delivery speed.
Standardize SLO definitions, measurement methods, ownership, and governance across applications.
Automate collection, calculation, visualization, and reporting of SLO performance.
Identify services with inadequate monitoring or reliability targets and develop plans to address those gaps.
Analyze observability data to identify performance degradation, reliability risks, recurring incidents, capacity constraints, and emerging trends.
Correlate technical telemetry with customer experience and business outcomes.
Develop health scores, trend analyses, anomaly detection, and predictive indicators.
Conduct deep-dive analysis to determine root causes and broader patterns behind incidents and service degradation.
Produce concise operational insights and recommendations for executive and technical audiences.
Measure observability investment effectiveness through outcomes such as reduced detection time, faster recovery, fewer recurring incidents, and improved SLO attainment.
Serve as a senior technical authority for observability, monitoring, and reliability measurement.
Develop observability strategies, standards, roadmaps, and adoption models.
Work with executives, architects, application teams, site reliability engineers, security teams, and operations leaders.
Coach engineering teams on instrumentation, dashboard design, SLO development, and data-driven problem-solving.
Lead technical evaluations and recommend observability platforms and capabilities.
Promote operational decision-making based on measurable service performance and customer impact.