Associate Director, Observability and Service Reliability

The Role

Enterprise Observability Strategy
Own and mature the enterprise observability and service reliability strategy.
Define standards for monitoring applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms, networks, endpoints, APIs, databases, middleware, and other critical technology services.
Establish expectations for metrics, logs, traces, events, synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, digital experience, service health, and business transaction visibility.
Create a consistent enterprise approach while allowing teams to use monitoring technologies suited to their platforms and services.
Identify monitoring gaps, redundant capabilities, excessive alerting, and opportunities to improve visibility.
Move the organization from traditional monitoring toward proactive, predictive, and automated operations.

Service Reliability Engineering
Establish and mature the organization’s service reliability framework.
Partner with technical service owners to define monitoring requirements for critical applications and services.
Ensure monitoring reflects the complete service, including application performance, infrastructure, dependencies, integrations, user experience, business transactions, capacity, and failure conditions.
Define minimum observability requirements based on service criticality and business impact.
Help teams establish meaningful Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives, availability targets, performance thresholds, and health measures.
Use reliability data, incidents, problem records, capacity trends, and telemetry to identify systemic weaknesses and prioritize improvements.

Technical Thought Leadership
Serve as the enterprise technical authority for observability, monitoring, and service reliability.
Provide architectural guidance to application, infrastructure, cloud, engineering, DevOps, SRE, cybersecurity, and operations teams.
Influence solution design so services are observable, measurable, supportable, and resilient by design.
Develop enterprise monitoring patterns, reference architectures, standards, and reusable capabilities.
Guide technical teams in selecting appropriate monitoring methods and technologies for specific platforms and use cases.
Evaluate emerging observability, AIOps, automation, analytics, and service reliability capabilities for measurable operational value.

Observability Platform Leadership
Provide strategic oversight for the enterprise observability and monitoring tool ecosystem.
Lead the strategy, architecture, governance, adoption, and optimization of major platforms, including Dynatrace, Nexthink, and related enterprise monitoring technologies.
Ensure monitoring tools operate as an integrated ecosystem rather than isolated platforms.
Establish standards for instrumentation, tagging, alerting, dashboards, integrations, service mapping, ownership, and data quality.
Partner with technical teams to maximize platform value while reducing tooling duplication and complexity.
Manage strategic technology and vendor relationships to ensure observability investments deliver measurable operational value.

Dynatrace Platform Strategy
Provide strategic leadership for enterprise use of Dynatrace across applications, infrastructure, cloud, and digital services.
Drive adoption of application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, logs, topology, service health, and intelligent problem detection.
Partner with technical owners to improve application instrumentation and ensure Dynatrace provides meaningful service visibility.
Use Dynatrace capabilities to improve root cause identification, dependency visibility, anomaly detection, and incident response.

Nexthink and Digital Employee Experience
Lead the enterprise strategy for Nexthink and Digital Employee Experience.
Provide visibility into endpoint health, application performance, employee technology experience, device reliability, and technology friction.
Partner with Digital Workplace, Service Desk, application teams, and infrastructure teams to identify and remediate issues proactively.
Use experience data to reduce support demand, improve employee productivity, and identify systemic technology issues.
Expand automation and targeted remediation to resolve employee experience issues at scale.

Event Management, AIOps, and Automation
Improve operational signal quality by reducing noise and increasing alert relevance.
Drive event correlation, enrichment, anomaly detection, automated diagnostics, and proactive remediation.
Integrate observability platforms with ITSM, incident management, automation, collaboration, configuration, and operational data platforms.
Develop capabilities that help support teams detect degradation earlier and understand business impact faster.
Use AI, machine learning, analytics, and automation where they improve outcomes and reduce manual effort.

Governance, Metrics, and Continuous Improvement
Establish governance for enterprise monitoring standards, tooling, integrations, data quality, licensing, and adoption.
Develop executive and operational reporting that provides insight into service health, reliability, performance, and user experience.
Use service measures to identify reliability risks, guide investment decisions, and prioritize service improvements.
Key measures may include:

Service availability and reliability
Mean Time to Detect, Mean Time to Identify, and Mean Time to Restore
Monitoring coverage for critical services
Service Level Objective attainment
Alert quality and noise reduction
Proactive issue detection and automated remediation
Digital Employee Experience
Recurring service degradation
Observability maturity
Tool adoption and value realization

Leadership Responsibilities
Lead and develop observability, monitoring, reliability, and platform engineering professionals.
Create an engineering culture focused on proactive operations, technical excellence, automation, and measurable service outcomes.
Build strong partnerships with application owners, platform owners, infrastructure, cloud, network, cybersecurity, Digital Workplace, DevOps, SRE, Service Management, and business teams.
Influence technical teams without relying solely on direct reporting authority.
Create clear accountability for monitoring coverage and service reliability across the enterprise.
Partner with Incident, Problem, Change, Major Incident Management, and Operational Resilience teams to improve detection, recovery, and prevention.

Who You Are

Required Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
8 or more years of experience in observability, application performance, service reliability, infrastructure, cloud, engineering, or enterprise technology operations.
3 or more years of technical leadership or people leadership experience.
Experience designing and operating monitoring and observability capabilities in complex enterprise environments.
Experience with Dynatrace and familiarity with Nexthink or comparable Digital Employee Experience technologies.
Knowledge of observability technologies, monitoring architectures, application performance management, infrastructure monitoring, event management, logging, tracing, synthetic monitoring, and user experience monitoring.
Understanding of modern enterprise applications, cloud technologies, containers, APIs, networks, databases, infrastructure, and distributed architectures.
Experience defining service health, reliability measures, Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives, and operational performance standards.
Ability to influence senior technical leaders and translate complex technical concepts into business risk and operational outcomes.
Strong leadership, architecture, analytical, problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Qualifications
Advanced Dynatrace experience in a large enterprise environment.
Experience implementing or scaling Nexthink.
Experience with ServiceNow and enterprise event management platforms.
Experience with Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, AIOps, automation, OpenTelemetry, cloud native monitoring, and modern observability architectures.
Experience establishing enterprise monitoring standards or observability reference architectures.
Experience within complex, global, or highly regulated enterprise environments.