Observability Platform Team Lead

As an Observability Platform Team Lead, you'll define how Gong sees and understands its production systems. You'll lead the team that builds our telemetry foundation: instrumentation standards, pipelines and tooling that let every engineering team detect, investigate and resolve issues quickly. This role sits where backend engineering meets production operations.

If you're a hands-on backend engineer who has led OpenTelemetry adoption and believes good observability is something you design in, not bolt on, this is your opportunity to shape the practice from the ground up.

You'll Own:

• Team leadership & mentorship: Shaping and growing a high-performing team, and building a culture of ownership, curiosity and operational excellence.
• Observability strategy & standards: Defining how services emit logs, metrics and traces, including conventions, defaults and a golden path that teams actually want to use.
• OpenTelemetry adoption: Leading instrumentation across our Java and Spring Boot services, from SDKs and auto-instrumentation to Collector architecture and context propagation.
• Telemetry pipelines & vendors: Owning the reliability, scalability and cost efficiency of telemetry pipelines in a multi-vendor environment.

You'll Solve:

• Signal vs. noise: Turning large volumes of telemetry into actionable insights by improving alert quality, cutting alert fatigue, and keeping cardinality and cost under control.
• Visibility into the data layer: Defining how we monitor PostgreSQL, MongoDB, OpenSearch, Redis and Kafka, so issues show up before customers notice them.
• Distributed systems debugging: Making it fast to trace a problem across services, queues and data stores.

You'll Impact:

• Detection and recovery time: Helping teams find and fix production issues faster, with clear SLIs and SLOs for critical services.
• Engineering velocity: Providing libraries, templates and self-service tools so product teams get observability by default.
• Reliability culture: Bringing SRE practices into R&D, including SLOs, error budgets, and healthy on-call.

How You'll Succeed Here:

• You have 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience, including 2+ years leading engineers, formally or as a tech lead.
• You have deep, hands-on backend engineering experience building large-scale distributed systems. Java & Spring Boot experience is a strong advantage.
• You have hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry: instrumentation (manual and auto), the collector, OTLP, semantic conventions and trace context propagation.
• You understand SRE fundamentals: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, alerting strategy, and incident response.
• You know the key health signals of common data stores and messaging systems (e.g., PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, Kafka) and how to monitor them well.
• You're comfortable on AWS and Kubernetes, and have worked with commercial or open-source observability backends.
• You see observability as a product: you gather needs from engineering teams, influence without direct authority, and drive adoption.
• You balance quick wins with long-term architecture, and you watch cost as closely as coverage.
• You hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

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