Senior Observability Engineer

Verisign • Reston, VA

5d • 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 for executive decision makers, technology leaders, and application teams to understand system health, service performance, customer impact, and operational risks. This position is part of the Architecture & Infrastructure Services (AIS) engineering and infrastructure team, responsible for the design, administration, security, and operation of shared services infrastructure. The role strengthens operational insight and supports key decisions through analytics, with a focus on system availability, reliability, and scalability. The ideal candidate combines deep observability expertise and technical leadership with strong data-analysis and communication skills, and can connect engineering performance to business outcomes for both executive and technical audiences.

The engineer will establish application SLIs and SLOs, dashboards, and analytical models; define observability strategies, standards, roadmaps, and adoption models; and help teams make operational decisions based on measurable service performance and customer impact. The position is based in Verisign’s Reston, Virginia office and offers 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 to support prioritization, risk management, and operational decisions.
• Define dashboard standards for consistent 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 the collection, calculation, visualization, and reporting of SLO performance.
• Identify services lacking adequate monitoring or reliability targets and develop plans to address the 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.
• Perform 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 decisions based on measurable service performance and customer impact.

Benefits

• Discretionary bonus based on individual and company performance.
• Certain roles may be eligible for discretionary stock awards.
• Competitive benefits are mentioned, but specific benefit details are not provided.

What This Job Offers

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