Observability Systems Engineer
US$178,000 – US$200,000 / yr base salary
Posted 15 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Sr. Observability Systems Engineer”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 8+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- Remote
| Base salary | US$178,000 – US$200,000 / yr |
|---|---|
| Cash bonus | US$18,000 – US$20,000 |
| Total comp | US$196,000 – US$220,000 |
Role Overview
This is a senior individual contributor role with significant architectural ownership. You will set the technical direction for how Backblaze detects, correlates, and responds to infrastructure incidents across our data centers, and you will mentor other engineers on the team as that platform matures. If you have a passion for making complex distributed systems visible, you are comfortable making architecture decisions that will outlive your tenure, and you are excited about applying AI and agentic automation to infrastructure operations, this role was built for you..
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership
- Set technical direction and standards for observability across the organization, including instrumentation conventions, alerting philosophy, and dashboard design patterns.
- Mentor engineers on the Observability team and act as a technical resource for SRE, Storage Engineering, and Network Engineering on observability practice.
- Lead design reviews for observability work and represent the team in cross-functional architecture discussions.
- Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions for observability and AIOps tooling, including data sovereignty and compliance considerations.
- Produce and maintain design documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records that make the platform operable and extensible by future contributors.
Observability Platform
- Own and evolve our metrics pipeline, including VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, and the Consul-based service discovery layer that keeps scrape targets current as infrastructure scales.
- Own and expand our logging stack (OpenSearch, Logstash, and Filebeat) across all Backblaze data centers.
- Architect and expand distributed tracing with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, extending coverage beyond the current application instrumentation to new services.
- Define and maintain Grafana dashboard standards for infrastructure, storage, and application performance visibility.
- Drive expansion of internal application telemetry in partnership with application teams to improve visibility.
- Define capacity and retention strategy for the telemetry stack as the fleet grows.
Infrastructure & Automation
- Own infrastructure-as-code for observability stack deployments across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
- Write and review automated playbooks for configuration management and automation across Debian-based bare metal servers.
- Partner with the SRE team on Consul-based service discovery for VictoriaMetrics scrape target automation.