Head of Observability

Role overview

This is a senior technical leadership opportunity for an observability leader based in the United Arab Emirates. The role sits within a remote-first environment and is being handled on behalf of a partner company, which will manage the application review and subsequent hiring steps.

You will be accountable for shaping and scaling the full observability strategy across a high-scale platform used by developers. The scope includes both the internal observability stack that supports reliability, incident handling, and performance engineering, and the customer-facing observability product that helps developers inspect and troubleshoot their applications. The position combines platform architecture, product direction, and team leadership, with responsibility for bringing logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting together into a unified and scalable ecosystem. You will also have broad ownership over build-versus-buy choices and long-term technical planning.

The organization operates in a fast-moving, distributed setting where observability is expected to be built into core system design. This is a high-impact role for someone who has already created observability platforms at scale and wants to do so again with full autonomy and accountability.

Key accountabilities

• Set the vision and execution plan for observability across the stack, including logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, profiling, and telemetry for both internal systems and customer-facing products.
• Design and continuously improve a unified observability platform, making informed technology and architecture choices that support scale, resilience, and efficiency.
• Put SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and capacity planning practices into place so observability becomes part of everyday reliability and engineering decisions.
• Own the external observability experience, covering dashboards, logs, metrics, and alerting capabilities, with a strong focus on developer usability.
• Recruit, mentor, and guide a strong observability engineering team while setting technical expectations, hiring standards, and delivery practices.
• Promote standard instrumentation across services through OpenTelemetry and related frameworks, working closely with engineering partners.
• Build and run high-volume telemetry pipelines for data ingestion, storage, search, and analytics at scale.
• Maintain strong reliability, scalability, and cost control across observability infrastructure as the platform and usage grow.
• Encourage a strong internal dogfooding culture so that internal tooling and customer experiences continuously inform one another.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including 3 or more years in technical leadership or engineering management.
• Demonstrated success in building, scaling, or operating observability platforms in production at high scale.
• Broad expertise in observability areas such as logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and dashboarding.
• Practical experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse, VictoriaMetrics, OpenTelemetry, or comparable technologies.
• Background in designing distributed systems and telemetry pipelines, with a solid grasp of trade-offs around scalability, reliability, and performance.
• A product-oriented mindset and the ability to treat observability as a developer product rather than only an infrastructure concern.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and cross-functional partners.
• Comfort working in ambiguous, rapidly changing, remote-first environments while making important architecture decisions.
• Advantageous but not required: experience with customer-facing observability products, open-source contributions in observability, or dogfooding-led organizations.

Benefits

• Fully remote global setup with the flexibility to work from anywhere.
• Competitive compensation that includes equity participation through ESOP.
• Home office and technology support allowance.
• Health coverage with full employee insurance and partial dependent coverage.
• Annual company off-sites for in-person connection and collaboration.
• Flexible, asynchronous working style centered on autonomy and impact.
• Annual learning and development budget for training, events, and professional growth.
• Exposure to a globally distributed engineering organization building widely used developer infrastructure.
• The chance to influence core observability systems used by both internal teams and external developers at scale.

Additional information

This opportunity is posted through a partner company. Applications are reviewed using an AI-assisted matching process to shortlist candidates against the core requirements. The shortlist is then passed to the hiring company, which handles interviews, assessments, and final decisions.

Privacy and hiring process notice

By submitting an application, you consent to the processing of personal data for candidate evaluation and for sharing relevant information with the hiring employer under applicable data protection laws, including GDPR where relevant. You may exercise rights such as access, correction, deletion, and objection. AI tools may assist with parts of the recruitment workflow, such as resume review and response analysis, but human review remains part of the final hiring decision.