Cloud Observability Architect

About the role

We are seeking a Cloud Observability Architect to serve as the strategic leader responsible for redefining how Tyler measures, monitors, and understands the health of its cloud and SaaS platforms. This role will drive a fundamental shift from traditional infrastructure-centric monitoring to a modern observability practice focused on application performance, customer experience, service reliability, and business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead the transformation of Tyler's observability strategy by championing an application-first approach focused on application performance, service reliability, customer experience, and business outcomes.
• Define, build, and evolve the enterprise observability architecture, establishing standardized platforms, integrations, and telemetry patterns that promote consistency, scalability, and operational efficiency across the organization.
• Develop and maintain an observability platform strategy that consolidates tooling, reduces complexity, and drives adoption of enterprise standards while balancing flexibility for diverse business needs.
• Serve as the primary observability subject matter expert and trusted advisor to engineering, product, SRE, Cloud Operations, FinOps, governance, and executive leadership teams.
• Evaluate, recommend, and guide the implementation of observability technologies, frameworks, and best practices to improve visibility across applications, services, platforms, and infrastructure.
• Drive the transition from infrastructure-centric monitoring to modern observability practices utilizing application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, metrics, logging, and telemetry analytics.
• Establish and mature an enterprise observability practice through standards, governance, architecture patterns, community engagement, and operational policies that position observability as a core engineering discipline.
• Partner with engineering and operational teams to define and implement Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and reliability frameworks that support customer commitments, SLA reporting, and operational excellence.
• Define and govern telemetry collection, retention, alerting, and incident detection standards to ensure actionable insights, reduce alert fatigue, optimize observability spend, and improve service reliability.
• Collaborate with FinOps teams to optimize observability-related costs through effective telemetry management, data lifecycle practices, and platform governance.
• Build and foster a community of practice that promotes observability adoption, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement across development, operations, and platform engineering teams.
• Manage strategic relationships with observability vendors and partners, influencing product roadmaps, evaluating emerging capabilities, and ensuring Tyler maximizes value from its observability investments.
• Analyze operational data and telemetry to identify opportunities for improved reliability, performance, customer experience, and cost optimization.
• Build consensus and influence technical direction across diverse stakeholder groups without direct authority.
• Take ownership of enterprise technologies and platforms, driving continuous improvement, adoption, and long-term strategic evolution.
• Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field; equivalent professional experience will be considered.
• 10+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Platform Engineering, Observability Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or Systems Engineering roles.
• 3+ years of experience architecting, implementing, and evolving enterprise-scale observability solutions within complex cloud, SaaS, or hybrid environments.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical transformation initiatives and driving adoption of new engineering practices across multiple teams and organizations.
• Strong experience assessing existing monitoring and observability ecosystems, developing strategic roadmaps, and guiding enterprise technology decisions.
• Deep understanding of modern observability principles, including application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, logging, metrics, telemetry pipelines, and service reliability engineering (SRE) practices.
• Experience defining and implementing Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), reliability metrics, and operational performance frameworks.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, microservices, and application-centric monitoring strategies.
• Experience operating within enterprise governance, security, compliance, and change management frameworks.
• Exceptional communication, presentation, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence engineering teams, senior leadership, and executive stakeholders.
• Demonstrated understanding of change management and operational controls within regulated environments.
• Ability to operate within compliance frameworks and security standards, including PCI, CJIS, SSAE, and other applicable regulatory requirements.
• Will be required to successfully complete a fingerprint-based background check to support CJIS-related responsibilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, New Relic, Sumo Logic, Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, or similar technologies.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and enterprise telemetry standardization initiatives.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, containers, cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, platform engineering, and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience establishing enterprise observability governance, communities of practice, architecture standards, or telemetry management frameworks.
• Experience partnering with FinOps organizations to optimize observability spend and telemetry-related cloud costs.
• Background supporting regulated environments, including government, public sector, payments, healthcare, or enterprise SaaS organizations.
• Experience designing, integrating, or implementing AI-assisted observability, AIOps, automated incident response, or intelligent operations workflows.
• Industry certifications in cloud platforms, SRE, observability, architecture, or related disciplines are desirable.