Principal Observability & Reliability Architect

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation. At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD. We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived. We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD. AHEAD is seeking a Principal Observability & Reliability Architect to join AHEAD’s Observability Practice within Intelligent Operations. This is a senior, client-facing architecture and delivery leadership role focused on helping enterprise clients improve operational visibility, service reliability, incident response, telemetry governance, and business-service visibility. The role operates as a player-coach, pairing senior advisory leadership with hands-on architecture guidance across observability platforms, telemetry pipelines, AIOps, and SRE-aligned operating models. It spans the full engagement lifecycle: pursuit solutioning, discovery, architecture design, estimation, delivery governance, escalation, and practice enablement. Responsibilities Lead client discovery, architecture workshops, and solution design across observability, telemetry, reliability, and operational intelligence initiatives. Design enterprise observability architectures spanning monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, telemetry pipelines, alerting, event correlation, service visibility, and platform integrations. Define scalable standards for telemetry onboarding, naming, tagging, RBAC, service ownership, dashboards, alert governance, runbooks, and operational handoff. Advise on telemetry governance, including data quality, retention, access control, sampling, cardinality, and cost optimization. Lead modernization initiatives including tool rationalization, dashboard and alert rationalization, telemetry strategy, and migration from legacy monitoring platforms. Guide SRE practices including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, production readiness, and incident response maturity. Design integration patterns across ITSM, CMDB, event management, and automation platforms. Support pursuits by shaping solution strategy, validating scope, informing estimates, and building client-facing technical narratives. Serve as a senior escalation point and provide architecture governance during delivery. Build reusable reference architectures, playbooks, and accelerators while mentoring architects, consultants, and offshore teams. Qualifications 10+ years in observability, monitoring, APM, platform operations, SRE, or related enterprise technology domains, including 5+ years leading architecture and delivery strategy for enterprise observability or reliability initiatives. Deep, hands-on experience designing and implementing across monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, telemetry collection, and pipeline patterns in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Strong knowledge of telemetry governance, including routing, transformation, normalization, enrichment, retention, access control, and cost management. Experience defining enterprise standards for dashboards, alerts, tagging, naming, service ownership, RBAC, and operating model adoption. Strong command of incident response, event correlation, alert strategy, service health, and business-service visibility, plus applied SRE concepts including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and production readiness. Ability to lead executive and technical workshops and translate business needs into actionable architecture and delivery plans. Consulting or professional services experience with strong client-facing communication, estimation, risk management, and cross-functional leadership. Preferred Qualifications Platform experience such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, LogicMonitor, Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Elastic, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry. Experience with telemetry pipeline tools such as OpenTelemetry Collector, Grafana Alloy, Fluent Bit, Kafka, Cribl, or Vector, along with familiarity with cloud, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code. Experience integrating with platforms such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, BigPanda, or xMatters. Experience developing reusable consulting assets such as reference architectures, governance models, playbooks, POVs, and accelerators; relevant cloud, SRE, ITIL, or FinOps certifications are a plus. The compensation range indicated in this posting reflects the On-Target Earnings (“OTE”) for this role, which includes a base salary and any applicable target bonus amount. This OTE range may vary based on the candidate’s relevant experience, qualifications, and geographic location. Why AHEAD: Through our daily work and internal groups like Moving Women AHEAD and RISE AHEAD, we value and benefit from diversity of people, ideas, experience, and everything in between. We fuel growth by stacking our office with top-notch technologies in a multi-million-dollar lab, by encouraging cross department training and development, sponsoring certifications and credentials for continued learning. USA Employment Benefits include: - Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance - 401(k) - Paid company holidays - Paid time off - Paid parental and caregiver leave - Plus more! See benefits https://www.aheadbenefits.com/ for additional details. Use of AI: We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, assessing responses, or to capture recordings and create transcriptions or summaries during interviews. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please refer to the Candidate Privacy Notice or contact us at [email protected] . You may opt-out of the review or analysis of your application and resume by AI tools by using the General Application . Please include the role you wish to apply for in the Additional Information field. You may also choose to opt-out of recording and transcription at any time, including after joining an interview. Candidates will not be penalized for choosing to opt-out.