Head of Observability

Role overview

This opportunity is for a senior observability leader based in Saudi Arabia. You will define and scale the observability approach for a high-scale, developer-facing platform, shaping both the internal systems that support reliability, incident handling, and performance work, as well as the external observability product used by developers to inspect and troubleshoot their applications.

The role combines platform architecture, product strategy, and people leadership. You will bring together logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and profiling into one coherent system, while having the autonomy to make build-versus-buy decisions and set the long-term technical roadmap. The environment is remote-first and fast-moving, with close collaboration across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams.

This position is suited to someone who has already built observability platforms at scale and wants full ownership of the next chapter.

Key accountabilities

• Set the overall observability direction across internal tooling and customer-facing capabilities, spanning logs, metrics, traces, alerts, profiling, and telemetry.
• Design and continuously improve a unified observability platform, including major technology and architecture decisions that support scale, resilience, and performance.
• Put SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and capacity planning into practice so observability directly informs reliability and engineering choices.
• Own the developer-facing observability experience, ensuring the dashboards, logs, metrics, and alerting tools are strong, usable, and integrated.
• Recruit, coach, and lead an observability engineering team, while setting standards for quality, execution, and technical excellence.
• Drive consistent instrumentation practices across services through OpenTelemetry and similar frameworks, partnering closely with engineering teams.
• Build and run telemetry pipelines that can handle high volumes of ingestion, storage, querying, and analytics.
• Maintain reliability, scalability, and cost discipline across observability infrastructure as system complexity and usage grow.
• Promote internal dogfooding by aligning the tools used internally with the experience delivered to customers, creating strong feedback loops.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including 3 or more years in technical leadership or engineering management.
• Hands-on background in building, scaling, or running observability platforms in demanding production environments.
• Strong depth across observability areas such as logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and dashboards.
• Practical experience with tools and systems such as Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse, VictoriaMetrics, OpenTelemetry, or comparable technologies.
• Ability to design distributed systems and telemetry pipelines with a clear understanding of scale, reliability, and performance trade-offs.
• A product-oriented mindset that treats observability as a developer product, not only as backend infrastructure.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and cross-functional audiences.
• Comfort working in ambiguous, remote-first, fast-changing environments and making high-stakes architectural calls.
• Bonus experience includes customer-facing observability products, open-source contributions in observability, or experience in dogfooding-led companies.

Perks and benefits

• Remote-first global setup with the flexibility to work from anywhere.
• Competitive compensation, with equity participation through ESOP.
• Home office and technology support allowance.
• Health coverage that includes fully covered employee insurance and partial coverage for dependents.
• Annual company off-sites for team connection and collaboration.
• Flexible, asynchronous work culture focused on autonomy and outcomes.
• Yearly learning and development budget for training, conferences, and growth.
• Exposure to a globally distributed engineering organization building widely used developer infrastructure.
• The chance to shape observability systems used by both internal teams and external developers at scale.

Application and hiring process

This role is listed on behalf of a partner company, which handles applications and the next stages of the process directly. Applications are reviewed through an AI-assisted matching flow designed to prioritize candidates against the role’s core requirements. The shortlist is then shared with the hiring company, and interviews or assessments are managed by their internal team.

Privacy and data handling

By applying, you agree that your personal data may be processed to assess your candidacy and shared with the hiring employer where needed for recruitment purposes, in line with applicable data protection laws. The hiring process may also use AI-enabled tools to support screening, resume analysis, response review, and inconsistency checks, but human judgment remains part of the final decision-making process.