Head of Observability

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Head of Observability based in Portugal.

This is a senior technical leadership role responsible for defining and scaling the entire observability strategy across a high-scale, developer-facing platform. You will own both the internal observability systems used for reliability, incident response, and performance engineering, as well as the customer-facing observability product that enables developers to deeply understand and debug their applications. The role spans architecture, product thinking, and team leadership, requiring you to unify logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting into a cohesive, scalable ecosystem. You will have significant autonomy to shape build-versus-buy decisions and set long-term technical direction. Working in a fast-moving, remote-first environment, you will collaborate across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to ensure observability is embedded at the core of system design. This is a high-impact position for someone who has built observability platforms at scale and is excited to do it again with full ownership and mandate.

• Define and lead the end-to-end observability strategy, covering logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, profiling, and telemetry across internal systems and customer-facing products.
• Architect and evolve a unified observability platform, evaluating tooling decisions and long-term system design to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Establish and operationalize SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and capacity planning frameworks to embed observability into reliability and engineering decision-making.
• Own the customer-facing observability experience, including dashboards, logs, metrics, and alerting tools, ensuring a best-in-class developer experience.
• Build and lead a high-performing observability engineering team, setting technical standards, hiring bar, mentorship practices, and execution excellence.
• Drive adoption of consistent instrumentation standards across all services using OpenTelemetry and related frameworks in collaboration with engineering teams.
• Design and operate high-throughput telemetry pipelines for ingestion, storage, querying, and analytics at scale.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of observability infrastructure while supporting rapid growth in system complexity and usage.
• Champion a strong internal “dogfooding” culture, aligning internal tooling with customer-facing experiences to create continuous feedback loops.

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Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in technical leadership or engineering management roles.
• Proven experience building, scaling, or operating observability platforms in high-scale production environments.
• Deep expertise across observability domains including logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and dashboarding.
• Strong hands-on experience with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ClickHouse, VictoriaMetrics, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent systems.
• Experience designing distributed systems and telemetry pipelines with strong understanding of scalability, reliability, and performance trade-offs.
• Strong product mindset with the ability to treat observability as a developer-facing product, not just infrastructure.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills, with the ability to influence both technical and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving, remote-first environments while making high-impact architectural decisions.
• Nice to have: experience with customer-facing observability products, open-source contributions in observability, or working in dogfooding-driven organizations.

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Benefits:

• Fully remote global work environment with flexibility to work from anywhere.
• Competitive compensation package including equity (ESOP) participation in company growth.
• Home office and tech allowance to support your ideal working setup.
• Comprehensive health coverage, including employee insurance fully covered and partial dependent coverage.
• Annual company off-sites for global team connection and collaboration.
• Flexible, asynchronous work culture focused on autonomy and impact.
• Annual learning and development budget for courses, conferences, and professional growth.
• Access to a global, highly distributed engineering organization working on widely used developer infrastructure.
• Opportunity to shape core observability systems used by both internal teams and external developers at scale.