Principal Observability & Reliability Architect

About the role

AHEAD is seeking a Principal Observability & Reliability Architect to join the Observability Practice within Intelligent Operations. This role is senior, client-facing, and focuses on improving operational visibility, service reliability, incident response, telemetry governance, and business-service visibility for enterprise clients.

Responsibilities

• Lead client discovery, architecture workshops, and solution design across observability, telemetry, reliability, and operational intelligence initiatives.
• Design enterprise observability architectures spanning monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, telemetry pipelines, alerting, event correlation, service visibility, and platform integrations.
• Define scalable standards for telemetry onboarding, naming, tagging, RBAC, service ownership, dashboards, alert governance, runbooks, and operational handoff.
• Advise on telemetry governance, including data quality, retention, access control, sampling, cardinality, and cost optimization.
• Lead modernization initiatives including tool rationalization, dashboard and alert rationalization, telemetry strategy, and migration from legacy monitoring platforms.
• Guide SRE practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, production readiness, and incident response maturity.
• Support pursuits by shaping solution strategy, validating scope, informing estimates, and building client-facing technical narratives.
• Serve as a senior escalation point and provide architecture governance during delivery.
• Build reusable reference architectures, playbooks, and accelerators while mentoring architects, consultants, and offshore teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in observability, monitoring, APM, platform operations, SRE, or related enterprise technology domains, including 5+ years leading architecture and delivery strategy for enterprise observability or reliability initiatives.
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and implementing across monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, telemetry collection, and pipeline patterns in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Strong knowledge of telemetry governance, including routing, transformation, normalization, enrichment, retention, access control, and cost management.
• Experience defining enterprise standards for dashboards, alerts, tagging, naming, service ownership, RBAC, and operating model adoption.
• Strong command of incident response, event correlation, alert strategy, service health, and business-service visibility, plus applied SRE concepts including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and production readiness.
• Ability to lead executive and technical workshops and translate business needs into actionable architecture and delivery plans.
• Consulting or professional services experience with strong client-facing communication, estimation, risk management, and cross-functional leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Platform experience such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, LogicMonitor, Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Elastic, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with telemetry pipeline tools such as OpenTelemetry Collector, Grafana Alloy, Fluent Bit, Kafka, Cribl, or Vector, along with familiarity with cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
• Experience integrating with platforms such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, BigPanda, or xMatters.
• Experience developing reusable consulting assets such as reference architectures, governance models, playbooks, POVs, and accelerators; relevant cloud, SRE, ITIL, or FinOps certifications are a plus.

Pay

$180,000 - $240,000 a year

Schedule

N/A

Benefits

USA Employment Benefits Include Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
401(k)
Paid company holidays
Paid time off
Paid parental and caregiver leave
Plus more!

See benefits here.