Description Senior Cloud Engineer - Observability & Performance Engineering
Location: Washington, DC 20549
Work Arrangement: Fully Onsite
Clearance Requirement: Ability to obtain and maintain Public Trust
Position Overview
We are seeking a highly experienced Cloud Engineer (Observability) to lead the engineering, optimization, and operational maturity of enterprise observability platforms across hybrid cloud and containerized environments.
This role is ideal for a hands-on engineer with deep expertise in Datadog, distributed tracing, APM, cloud monitoring, performance engineering, and site reliability practices. The successful candidate will partner with infrastructure, cloud, platform, and application teams to improve operational visibility, reduce alert fatigue, accelerate incident resolution, and drive data-informed operational decisions.
Key Responsibilities
Observability Platform Engineering
- Engineer and operate enterprise observability solutions including:
- Metrics
- Logs
- Distributed tracing
- APM
- Real User Monitoring (RUM)
- Synthetic monitoring
- Network monitoring
- Build and optimize dashboards, alerts, SLOs, and SLIs
- Implement OpenTelemetry and language-specific instrumentation
- Integrate observability tooling with ServiceNow, CI/CD pipelines, and incident management workflows
- Establish and maintain telemetry tagging standards and governance
Cloud & Container Monitoring
- Design monitoring solutions for Azure and AWS workloads
- Implement observability for:
- Serverless services
- Managed databases
- Networking
- Identity services
- Cloud-native platforms
- Support Kubernetes and OpenShift monitoring including clusters, nodes, workloads, and service mesh environments
- Develop reusable observability modules using Infrastructure-as-Code
Performance Engineering & Reliability
- Lead investigation and remediation of performance, latency, reliability, and capacity issues
- Utilize APM, profiling, distributed tracing, and database analytics to identify bottlenecks
- Define trace-based alerting and deployment correlation strategies
- Support major incident response activities and root cause analysis efforts
Capacity Planning & Operational Excellence
- Analyze telemetry and capacity trends to identify risks and opportunities
- Develop reporting and dashboards for leadership and engineering teams
- Improve alert quality, monitoring coverage, and operational maturity
- Support enterprise SLA, KPI, and availability objectives
Requirements Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
8+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, cloud, or operations engineering
5+ years of experience focused on:
- Observability
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Performance Engineering
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Experience administering and optimizing observability platforms such as:
- Datadog
- Dynatrace
- New Relic
- Splunk Observability
- Grafana/Prometheus
Strong experience with:
- OpenTelemetry
- Distributed tracing
- Performance tuning
- APM engineering
- Cloud-native monitoring
Experience supporting Azure, AWS, and containerized platforms
Proven ability to troubleshoot complex performance and reliability issues
Ability to obtain and maintain Public Trust clearance
Preferred Qualifications
Experience supporting federal or regulated environments
Experience with:
- Kubernetes
- OpenShift
- Terraform
- ARM
- Bicep
Strong understanding of:
- SLO/SLI engineering
- Incident management
- Capacity planning
- Operational analytics
Experience integrating observability platforms with ServiceNow and CI/CD tooling
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