Sr. Observability Systems Engineer
Backblaze External Website6 days ago
Base Salary
$178k - $200k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and standards for organization-wide observability, including instrumentation, alerting, and dashboard design.
- Mentor Observability engineers and provide technical guidance to SRE, Storage Engineering, and Network Engineering.
- Lead design reviews, architecture discussions, build-versus-buy evaluations, and observability documentation.
- Own and evolve the metrics pipeline, logging stack, distributed tracing platform, Grafana standards, telemetry strategy, and service discovery integrations.
- Manage observability infrastructure-as-code and automation across Kubernetes clusters and Debian-based bare-metal servers.
- Lead Ceph storage observability and collaborate on BGP, routing, and network-level observability.
- Evaluate and deploy AIOps tooling and AI-agent systems for alert correlation, deduplication, and automated root-cause analysis.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in systems engineering, SRE, DevOps, or observability-focused roles, including technical leadership on a platform or infrastructure team.
- Deep hands-on experience with Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or equivalent metrics platforms, including PromQL and Alertmanager.
- Experience designing and operating log aggregation pipelines such as Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, Logstash, and Filebeat.
- Working knowledge of distributed tracing and instrumentation strategy with Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent tools.
- Proficiency in Python and/or Go for automation and tooling.
- Experience with Kubernetes, including workload deployment, pod networking, and storage.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration-management tooling.
- Strong Linux knowledge, preferably with Debian or Ubuntu.
- Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and raising technical standards.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including design-document authorship.
- Preferred qualifications include AIOps deployment, AI-agent or agentic AI experience, LLM APIs or self-hosted inference, Ceph, incident-management platforms, BGP, network observability, multi-data-center environments, secrets management, regulated environments, and storage or hyperscale infrastructure.
Benefits
- US base salary range of $178,000-$200,000, plus a 10% target annual bonus and RSUs.
- Equal Opportunity Employer committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Backblaze External Website
Backblaze provides cloud storage and backup services for businesses, developers, and individuals, centered on its B2 S3‑compatible object storage and Computer Backup offerings. It also offers B2 Overdrive for high‑throughput AI/GPU data pipelines and B2 Neo for white‑label enterprise storage, sold on usage-based and subscription pricing. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Mateo, the NASDAQ‑listed company (BLZE) serves 500,000+ customers across 175 countries.