Software Engineer (Observability & Monitoring) - West Des Moines, IA

Job Description

Job DescriptionJob Description:

Overview:

Seeking an experienced Observability and Monitoring Engineer to build and mature our enterprise-wide monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability capabilities across our AWS-based technology stack.

This role will define the strategy, architecture, implementation standards, and dashboards that enable proactive detection, faster troubleshooting, and data-driven insights across applications, infrastructure, operating systems, databases, file transfers, and batch processes.

The ideal candidate has hands-on engineering expertise, strong architecture skills, and the ability to unify multiple monitoring solutions into a cohesive observability framework.

Responsibilities:

You will establish standards for logs, metrics, traces, event correlation, and alert across multiple environments

You will build centralized dashboards and alerting policies that provide unified visibility across: applications & services, operating systems, AWS services (EC2, RDS, Lambda, S3, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, etc.), databases (MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc.), file transfer systems (SFTP, managed transfer tools), batch jobs and scheduled processes.

You will create actionable and noise-free alerting thresholds, escalation policies, and runbooks.

You will integrate existing tools (Dynatrace, Graylog, Splunk, SolarWinds, Zabbix) into a cohesive ecosystem.

You will rationalize tool usage and recommend consolidation or modernization where appropriate.

You will manage the lifecycle, configuration, tuning, and health of monitoring and logging platforms, automate monitoring deployments using IaC (CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines, and develop reusable templates/standards so teams can onboard new applications quickly.

You will build self-service dashboards and reporting for technical/business stakeholders, create documentation for monitoring standards, dashboard naming conventions, logging schemas, and alert configuration guidelines.

You will define SLOs/SLIs and reliability KPIs for critical services.

You will partner with scrum teams, infrastructure, and security teams to reduce MTTR and improve system reliability, participate in incident resolution, root cause analysis, and problem management.

You will provide technical leadership/mentoring to team members and consult on architecture decisions and best practices.

You will Develop/maintain system documentation and participate in project planning and technical strategy sessions.

Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

5+ years of experience implementing monitoring and observability using Dynatrace

Hands-on experience with monitoring/logging tools such as Zabbix, Graylog, Splunk, SolarWinds, or equivalents

5+ years of hands-on experience with AWS services and architecture

Deep understanding of metrics, logs, traces, distributed tracing, and event correlation

Experience building dashboards and KPIs for application, infrastructure, and database layers

Strong scripting/automation skills (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and familiarity with Terraform or CloudFormation

Strong understanding of network monitoring, performance tuning, and systems architecture

Familiarity with ITIL incident/problem management processes

Proficiency with AI tools and using them responsibly in improving observability preferred

Experience with container orchestration and microservices architecture preferred

Experience with AWS OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar tools preferred

Required Technical Skills:

AWS Services (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, ECS/EKS, etc.)

Configuration Management (Ansible, Puppet, Chef)

Monitoring Tools (Dynatrace, CloudWatch, Zabbix, Solarwinds, Graylog etc.)

CI/CD Tools (Jenkins, Quickbuild, Bitbucket)

Scripting Languages (Python, PowerShell, Bash)

Database Management (MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL)

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)

Container Technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)