{"id":2656832,"url":"https://alion.io/job/backblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer","title":"Sr. Observability Systems Engineer","company":{"id":37551,"name":"Backblaze","domain":"backblaze.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/backblaze","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":12,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":62,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":121000,"max_usd":223000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":340},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AIOps","optional":false},{"name":"Alertmanager","optional":false},{"name":"BGP","optional":false},{"name":"Configuration Management","optional":false},{"name":"Consul","optional":false},{"name":"Debian","optional":false},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":false},{"name":"Filebeat","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"Jaeger","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Logstash","optional":false},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":false},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Ubuntu","optional":false},{"name":"VictoriaMetrics","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":true},{"name":"Incident Management","optional":true},{"name":"KVM","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-15T20:51:03Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T06:40:06Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Role Overview\nThis is a senior individual contributor role with significant architectural ownership. You will set the technical direction for how Backblaze detects, correlates, and responds to infrastructure incidents across our data centers, and you will mentor other engineers on the team as that platform matures. If you have a passion for making complex distributed systems visible, you are comfortable making architecture decisions that will outlive your tenure, and you are excited about applying AI and agentic automation to infrastructure operations, this role was built for you..\nKey Responsibilities\nTechnical Leadership\nSet technical direction and standards for observability across the organization, including instrumentation conventions, alerting philosophy, and dashboard design patterns.\nMentor engineers on the Observability team and act as a technical resource for SRE, Storage Engineering, and Network Engineering on observability practice.\nLead design reviews for observability work and represent the team in cross-functional architecture discussions.\nEvaluate build-versus-buy decisions for observability and AIOps tooling, including data sovereignty and compliance considerations.\nProduce and maintain design documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records that make the platform operable and extensible by future contributors.\nObservability Platform\nOwn and evolve our metrics pipeline, including VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, and the Consul-based service discovery layer that keeps scrape targets current as infrastructure scales.\nOwn and expand our logging stack (OpenSearch, Logstash, and Filebeat) across all Backblaze data centers.\nArchitect and expand distributed tracing with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, extending coverage beyond the current application instrumentation to new services.\nDefine and maintain Grafana dashboard standards for infrastructure, storage, and application performance visibility.\nDrive expansion of internal application telemetry in partnership with application teams to improve visibility.\nDefine capacity and retention strategy for the telemetry stack as the fleet grows.\nInfrastructure & Automation\nOwn infrastructure-as-code for observability stack deployments across multiple Kubernetes clusters.\nWrite and review automated playbooks for configuration management and automation across Debian-based bare metal servers.\nPartner with the SRE team on Consul-based service discovery for VictoriaMetrics scrape target automation.\nLead Ceph storage observability, including OSD health, performance metrics, and integration with alerting.\nCollaborate with the Network Engineering team on BGP, routing, and network-level observability.\nRequired Qualifications\n8+ years in a systems engineering, SRE, DevOps, or observability-focused role, including demonstrated technical leadership on a platform or infrastructure team.\nDeep hands-on experience with Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or equivalent metrics platforms, including PromQL, Alertmanager, and operating these systems at scale.\nExperience designing and operating log aggregation pipelines such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Logstash, Filebeat, or similar.\nWorking knowledge of distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent), including instrumentation strategy, not just operation.\nProficiency in Python and/or Go for automation and tooling.\nExperience with Kubernetes, including deploying workloads and understanding pod networking and storage.\nExperience with infrastructure-as-code tooling and configuration management.\nStrong understanding of Linux internals, with Debian/Ubuntu preferred.\nDemonstrated experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar on a team.\nExcellent written and verbal communication skills. You'll work across engineering, SRE, security, and leadership, and you'll be expected to write design documents that drive decisions.\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience leading the evaluation or deployment of AIOps tooling, including alert correlation, deduplication, or automated root cause analysis.\nExperience building, deploying, or operating AI agents or agentic AI systems. This is a strong differentiator.\nFamiliarity with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI) or self-hosted LLM inference in an infrastructure context.\nFamiliarity with Ceph storage, including OSD management, pool configuration, and CRUSH maps.\nExperience with incident management platforms.\nFamiliarity with BGP, network observability, or working in multi-DC environments.\nExperience with secrets management in production environments.\nExperience operating in a regulated or compliance-driven environment.\nPrior experience in a storage-focused company or hyperscale infrastructure environment.\nWhat You'll Work On\nA telemetry stack spanning several data centers with exabytes of storage under observation.\nReal infrastructure at scale: Kubernetes, Ceph, Vitess, KVM, and a custom storage platform serving hundreds of thousands of customers.\nA collaborative team that values engineering excellence, transparency, and operational rigor.\nPay Transparency\nTo provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.\nThe expected salary range for this role is $178,000 - $200,000 plus 10% target annual bonus and RSUs.\nAt Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5889,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Digital Storage","Cloud Storage & File Sharing","Backup & Disaster Recovery"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-15T23:10:05Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 1 · green card filings: 3","filings_12m":1,"filings_prev_12m":3,"green_card_filings_12m":3,"median_offered_wage_usd":137500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":1}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":62,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/backblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/backblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T09:58:49Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":8259,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":37551},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=37551"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fbackblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fbackblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fbackblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/backblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fbackblaze-sr-observability-systems-engineer"}]}