Staff Network Observability Engineer

Job Description:

The Senior Staff Engineer for NPE Observability is the preeminent technical strategist for Client''s global telemetry fabric. In this senior contract role, you will bridge the gap between high-scale distributed software and global network hardware, driving the architectural standards for our most complex data-intensive initiatives. You will own the technical integrity of our streaming pipelines, ensuring telemetry from the global fleet is ingested, normalized, and processed with sub-second latency. As a master of our tech stack (Java, Kafka, Postgres, Grafana), you will define the "Gold Standard" for technical excellence within the Network Platform Engineering (NPE) group.

Responsibilities Architectural Strategy & Technical Vision Core Stack Evolution:

Architect and optimize our primary ingestion and storage engines utilizing Java and PostgreSQL, ensuring high availability and performance at scale.

Real-Time Data Orchestration:

Lead the design of high-throughput messaging systems using Apache Kafka to handle trillions of telemetry points with sub-second latency.

Unified Visibility:

Define the global standard for observability visualization in Grafana, building complex, high-performance dashboards that aggregate data from diverse telemetry sources.

High-Scale Engineering & Innovation Stream Processing Mastery:

Architect massively parallel processing pipelines and stateful stream processing frameworks (utilizing tools like Apache Flink) to enable real-time anomaly detection.

Advanced R D:

Evaluate and prototype emerging technologies such as Model-Driven Telemetry (MDT) and ClickHouse/Thanos for long-term metric storage and high-cardinality data analysis.

Technical Roadmap Ownership:

Drive the engineering team toward key milestones, ensuring the code we ship aligns with the 3-5 year long-term NPE vision.

Reliability & Systemic Leadership Service Standards:

Define and monitor critical SLI/SLO metrics (e.g., P95 response times) to ensure the platform maintains world-class performance and global ITIL compliance.

Incident Authority:

Serve as the senior point of contact for complex root-cause analysis, identifying architectural weaknesses in the Java/Kafka/Postgres stack to prevent future outages.

Stakeholder Synthesis:

Translate complex product requirements into deep technical specifications, managing relationships with both internal software teams and external network vendors.

Required Qualifications & Experience Tenure:

10+ years of professional experience in software engineering and distributed systems.

Domain Expertise:

5+ years of experience specifically in large-scale network engineering, telemetry, or observability platforms.

Java Expert:

Mastery of Java for building high-performance, scalable backend services.

Data & Messaging:

Deep expertise in PostgreSQL (schema design and tuning) and Apache Kafka (cluster architecture and stream management).

Visualization:

Expert-level proficiency in Grafana for creating enterprise-level observability dashboards.

Large-Scale Systems:

Proven experience with Prometheus, Thanos, or ClickHouse and working within a structured Agile/Scrum environment.

Education:

Bachelor''s or Master''s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field