[Hiring] Associate Director, Technical Architecture @Merck

Role Description

We are seeking a visionary and influential technical leader to join as a Principal Engineer for Observability. In this role, you will be the chief architect and evangelist for our company-wide observability strategy. Your mission is to define and drive the adoption of a unified, full-stack observability framework that empowers our product teams to build and operate highly reliable, performant, and resilient services.

This is not just a technical role; it is a strategic one. You will work across organizational boundaries, from engineering teams to senior leadership, to champion a culture of operational excellence. You will be responsible for rationalizing our tooling landscape, eliminating redundancy, and designing a cohesive, self-service observability platform that is easy to consume. If you are passionate about turning complex technical concepts into clear business value and leading large-scale change, this is your opportunity to make a lasting impact.

What You'll Do

• Create Strategy: Create, document, and champion a unified, long-term observability strategy for the entire company, covering all telemetry types like metrics, traces, logs, profiles and more.
• Architect the Future: Design a cohesive, full-stack observability solution using best-in-class tools and practices. Ensure our architecture promotes a product-oriented approach with a strong focus on self-service capabilities.
• Drive Standardization and Consolidation: Actively identify and help decommission redundant or overlapping tools, driving the organization towards a standardized, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage observability service.
• Join forces with SRE team: Partner with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, promote their principles, such as defining, measuring, and managing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets and how critical Observability for them.
• Evangelize and Educate: Clearly and persuasively communicate complex observability topics, benefits, and strategic decisions to senior leadership and stakeholders across IT and business domains.
• Lead by Influence: Act as the senior technical expert and thought leader in the observability space. Mentor engineers and guide teams in implementing best practices for instrumentation (OpenTelemetry), monitoring, and incident analysis using AIOps.
• Stay on the Cutting Edge: Continuously research industry trends, emerging technologies (like eBPF, OpenTelemetry), and best practices to ensure our observability strategy remains modern and effective.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree
• 10+ years in Observability, software engineering, SRE, or platform engineering, with a proven track record of architecting and implementing large-scale technical solutions.
• Subject matter expert on Observability practices and collection of all types of telemetry.
• Demonstrable experience creating and executing a technical strategy across multiple teams or an entire organization.
• Deep, practical knowledge of Site Reliability Engineering principles, with hands-on experience defining, implementing, and managing SLOs and error budgets.
• Strong understanding and practical experience with the OpenTelemetry standard for instrumentation and telemetry collection.
• Experience designing solutions that operate across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• World-class ability to explain highly complex technical concepts to senior executives and non-technical audiences.

Requirements

• Experience leading projects to consolidate tooling and migrate teams to a centralized platform.
• Understanding of cloud cost management principles and how they apply to observability data and tooling.
• Familiarity with eBPF for advanced, low-level system observability and performance analysis.
• Experience thinking about internal platforms as products, with a focus on user experience, self-service, and clear documentation.

Benefits

• Define the technical direction for a critical capability across the entire company, directly influencing the reliability of all our products.
• Be the ultimate authority and thought leader in the observability domain with the freedom to shape our future.
• Work directly with senior leadership to connect deep technical initiatives with strategic business outcomes.
• Join a forward-thinking organization that invests in technical excellence and empowers its leaders to drive meaningful change.