Senior Principal Infrastructure Engineer / Advisor – APM

Truist Bank•Raleigh, NC

3d•Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking an exceptionally seasoned and strategic Senior Principal Infrastructure Engineer / Advisor – Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to define, guide, and evolve the enterprise APM strategy across the technology ecosystem. This role serves as the top-tier technical authority and trusted advisor for application performance monitoring, transaction tracing, and digital experience telemetry, ensuring observability platforms directly support reliability, scalability, and business outcomes. In this role, you will establish the long-term vision for APM capabilities, balancing open standards (such as OpenTelemetry) with commercial APM platforms like Dynatrace to deliver deep, actionable performance insights. You will influence architectural decisions across application, platform, SRE, and cloud teams, embedding performance engineering, proactive detection, and data-driven optimization into the full software development lifecycle. Success in this position means measurably improving application performance, reducing customer-impacting incidents, accelerating root-cause analysis, and enabling engineering teams with consistent, high-fidelity performance insights at scale. As the APM lead, you will shape standards, coach senior technologists, and partner with leadership to align APM investments with enterprise priorities.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and eight years of experience in development or production support or an equivalent combination of education and work experience.
Deep specialized and/or broad functional knowledge.
Sound understanding of business and organizational strategies and processes.
Ability to interpret internal and external business challenges and recommend best practices.
Ability to lead complex projects.
Sophisticated analytical skills and the ability to solve complex technical and business problems.
Ability to influence others at senior levels to adopt a new perspective.
English (Required) fluency.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree and eight years of experience in infrastructure engineering, application support, performance engineering, or an equivalent combination of education and work experience
Deep expertise in application performance monitoring concepts, including transaction tracing, service maps, dependency analysis, and end-user experience monitoring
Extensive knowledge of enterprise and cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, and modern application platforms
Proven ability to define and apply best practices and standards across large, complex technology organizations
Strong advisory and consulting skills, with the ability to influence senior engineers, architects, and leadership
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex and sensitive information clearly and effectively.
Deep hands-on experience with leading APM platforms such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, New Relic, Datadog, ThousandEyes, or similar enterprise solutions
Advanced expertise with OpenTelemetry for application instrumentation and integration with APM platforms
Strong background in cloud platforms, microservices, Kubernetes, service meshes, and event-driven architectures
Experience designing performance monitoring strategies for high-volume, low-latency, and customer-facing systems
Proficiency in one or more scripting or programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, Go) for custom instrumentation and automation
Proven track record of shaping enterprise monitoring strategy and driving adoption through influence rather than direct authority.

Responsibilities

Serves as the senior technical authority and advisor for enterprise APM strategy, architecture, and best practices.
Defines and drives the long-term vision for application performance monitoring, transaction tracing, and digital experience monitoring across legacy and cloud-native platforms.
Leads advanced problem tracking, performance diagnosis, root-cause analysis, and optimization for the most complex and business-critical applications.
Advises engineering and architecture teams on performance instrumentation, telemetry standards, and monitoring design patterns.
Partners with SRE, platform, cloud, and application leaders to embed APM into CI/CD pipelines and operational workflows.
Analyzes performance trends, systemic risks, and capacity indicators to recommend proactive improvements and architectural changes.
Establishes enterprise standards for APM tooling, instrumentation, data retention, and performance SLAs/SLOs.
Evaluates, selects, and governs commercial and open-source APM technologies; may engage and manage strategic vendor relationships.
Acts as an escalation point for high-severity performance incidents, guiding resolution and post-incident analysis.
Mentors senior engineers and technical leads, raising overall performance engineering and observability maturity.
Influences cross-organizational initiatives and roadmaps without direct authority, relying on expertise and leadership presence.
Communicates complex performance insights and technical tradeoffs clearly to both engineering and executive stakeholders.
Performs problem tracking, diagnosis and root-cause analysis, replication, troubleshooting, and resolution for highly complex issues.
Oversees others who perform programming and debugging activities.
Responds to issues in a timely manner by receiving and investigating incidents or service tickets.
Provides technical consultation on extremely challenging or unusual situations.
May lead large, complex projects related to improving processes or support capabilities.
May engage and manage external vendors.
Interprets internal/external business challenges and recommends best practices.
Uses sophisticated analytical thought to exercise judgment and identify innovative solutions.
Mentors less experienced teammates to build technical expertise.
May have people management responsibilities.