Technical Director- Observability

Job Description

Technical Director, Observability (US Remote) Who We Are

8th Light is a mid-size global employee-owned software consultancy, whose mission, vision and values reflect our dedication to quality, our emphasis on continual learning, and our belief that we can be a beacon for how tech companies should look and act. We are a high performing, collaborative and diverse workplace where those who value high performance, learning, mentoring and teaching, and making a positive impact, can contribute and thrive.

If being a hands-on individual contributor and influential leader in this type of collaborative, participatory, values-driven environment resonates with you, we'd love to talk. Reporting to the Head of Technology, 8th Light Technical Directors are experts in their field who work with clients as trusted partners and with employees as mentors. In this role, you’ll maintain a public presence in the tech community in order to secure client work that inspires you and others. You’ll also apply your expertise to client problems and work to build essential capabilities in your colleagues.

Who You Are

You are a seasoned technical leader with a proven track record of building high-quality software. You have a deep understanding of the concepts and techniques used in observability, including monitoring, logging, and tracing. You have a broad range of expertise that allows you to make an immediate impact on projects. You have experience with a variety of tools and techniques, and are able to use them to troubleshoot complex systems. You have a strong understanding of distributed systems and microservice architectures. You have experience with performance analysis and optimization. You have strong presentation and writing skills and can effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

In your previous experience, you have:

• Accumulated 10+ years maintaining and monitoring complex technical systems at scale.
• Led technical teams and managed engineers. While this is not primarily a management role, all directors at 8th Light manage people, so the ideal candidate will have spent some time in a managerial position.
• Managed multiple technical initiatives and priorities simultaneously in a professional services or consulting context.
• Defined measurable criteria for business impact and/or successful client engagements.
• Driven organization wide technical change.
• Made strategic technical recommendations to key decision makers.
• Mentored and shared knowledge with colleagues.

We work across many areas, and encourage anyone with the experience listed to apply. We would particularly like to encourage applicants with experience with the following specific tools and technologies:

• Elasticsearch, Kibana, Grafana, or other observability tools
• Distributed tracing tools such as Zipkin or Jaeger
• Monitoring and alerting tools such as Prometheus or Sensu
• Cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes
• SaaS observability tools such as New Relic or Datadog.
• Observability platforms such as Honeycomb or FirstLight

What You’ll Do at 8th Light

As a Technical Director at 8th Light, you will drive the adoption of best practices across our client projects and the organization at large. You will be the go-to person for all things observability, providing technical guidance and advice to both internal teams and external clients.

As an executive technical advisor to our clients, you’ll help them navigate the complex world of observability and provide recommendations on the best tools and approaches for their specific needs. In this role, you will work closely with our delivery teams to identify opportunities for work with our clients, provide targeted consulting support to address specific questions, and ensure that observability is integrated into our software development processes and projects. You will also work closely with the sales team, providing technical advice and guidance on sales pursuits and help to shape our technical proposals and pitches. Over the long term, about 60% of your time will be client-focused, billable work.

As curator of our internal capabilities, you will work closely with the Head of Technology to develop and maintain 8th Light's capabilities in observability, thinking strategically about the long term future of the field and curating our capabilities based on that vision. You will be responsible for staying up-to-date on the latest observability tools and practices and making sure our team has the skills and knowledge to deliver the best solutions for our clients. You will be responsible for mentoring and supporting senior technical leaders, helping them grow and develop their skills, as well as supporting our hiring team. You’ll also be responsible for representing 8th Light in the tech community, and sharing our expertise in observability.

You will be a key member of the leadership team, working closely with other directors and VPs to advocate for observability and ensure that it is integrated into all aspects of our client work.

Join Us –– 8th Light is Fully Remote

We recognize that creating a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization is an ongoing journey, and we’re excited to share our journey with you. We have a proud tradition of hiring talented colleagues with unusual career experiences. We're more interested in your experiences, results, and impact than brand names, degrees, or keywords that may appear on your resume.

8th Light currently recruits and supports a distributed team of employees in various states who work remotely. When opportunities allow we can also consider hiring talent eligible to work in the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Canada. In this new workplace landscape, it is rare that our consulting engagements require travel for current roles.

We are committed to supporting, onboarding, growth, and engagement of employees who choose to work remotely on a permanent basis. For team members who seek to work in-office, where local regulations allow, we can provide an experience that supports in-person social interaction and collaboration in our hub cities of Chicago, New York, London and Los Angeles. Learn more about our philosophy, plans, and updates by signing up for our Talent Community !

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