Senior Cloud Engineer, Observability

Your Tasks and Responsibilities

• Be the hands-on SME for our observability toolchain (e.g., Datadog, CloudWatch, OpenSearch), including log pipelines, tracing/telemetry standards, and platform templates.
• Run office hours, produce exemplars, and pair with teams to implement “known-good” instrumentation and alerting.
• Triage and resolve observability-related platform requests (new service onboarding, log/metric gaps, noisy alerts, dashboard standards) with clear ownership and measurable outcomes.
• Establish and operationalize SLIs/SLOs for key platform components and enable teams to define service SLOs without reinventing the wheel.
• Maintain opinionated “golden paths” for logging, metrics, tracing, and dashboards.
• Provide reusable templates for alerting patterns (latency, error-rate, saturation, dependency failures), tuned for actionable paging vs. noise.
• Reduce MTTR by improving detection, triage paths, runbooks, and “what changed” visibility.
• Drive reliability reviews focused on observability gaps: missing signals, unclear ownership, bad alerts, and uninstrumented failure modes.
• Partner with delivery teams to turn recurring incidents into durable fixes (instrumentation + alerting + automation + documentation).
• Embed observability checks into CI/CD and platform workflows (e.g., telemetry guardrails, dashboard/monitor templates, logging standards checks).
• Partner with Security/Compliance to ensure telemetry supports auditability and incident investigation without ad-hoc effort.
• Define and report platform observability KPIs: alert noise rate, % actionable alerts, MTTA/MTTR trends, onboarding time to “fully observable,” runbook coverage, incident recurrence.
• Run lightweight experiments to improve signal quality (threshold tuning, monitor redesign, dashboard UX), and ship improvements like a product owner.
• Create cost-aware telemetry standards (log volume controls, metric cardinality guidance, sampling strategies, retention tiers).
• Help teams optimize spend while improving reliability outcomes (“cheaper + better” logging/metrics patterns).
• Serve as a trusted partner to delivery units, Security, and Data—turning pain points into paved-road improvements.
• Mentor engineers and uplift organizational practices for incident response, reliability signals, and operational excellence.

Who You Are

Bayer seeks an incumbent who possesses the following:

Required

• Bachelor’s in computer science/engineering or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years hands-on AWS experience operating production workloads.
• Deep practical experience with observability in production, including: Datadog and/or CloudWatch (dashboards, monitors/alerts, log search, correlation).
• Designing actionable alerts (noise reduction, ownership, runbook-first alerts).
• Defining/using SLIs/SLOs and reliability metrics to drive behavior.
• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform; CloudFormation a plus).
• Strong programming for automation/tooling (Python, Go, or similar).
• Solid grasp of cloud architecture, networking, and security fundamentals.

Preferred

• Experience productizing observability enablement (templates, golden paths, standards, onboarding workflows).
• CI/CD at scale (GitLab pipelines), including integrating reliability/telemetry guardrails into delivery workflows.
• Logging/telemetry platforms beyond CloudWatch/Datadog (e.g., ELK/OpenSearch) and experience managing scale concerns (volume, retention, cardinality).
• Container platforms (ECS/EKS) and common AWS data services (RDS/Aurora, S3/lake patterns, MSK/Kinesis).
• FinOps experience related to observability (tagging, allocation, optimizing telemetry cost).
• Relevant AWS certifications and excellent communication skills.