---
title: 'Sr. Observability Systems Engineer at Backblaze External Website'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sr-observability-systems-engineer-backblaze-external-website-united-states-wzt0ak5q5a4g'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-16'
---

# Sr. Observability Systems Engineer at Backblaze External Website

- **Company:** Backblaze External Website
- **Location:** United States
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-16
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/backblaze/jobs/5441956008

## Job description

## Role Overview

This is a senior individual contributor role with significant architectural ownership. You will set the technical direction for how Backblaze detects, correlates, and responds to infrastructure incidents across our data centers, and you will mentor other engineers on the team as that platform matures. If you have a passion for making complex distributed systems visible, you are comfortable making architecture decisions that will outlive your tenure, and you are excited about applying AI and agentic automation to infrastructure operations, this role was built for you..

## Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

- Set technical direction and standards for observability across the organization, including instrumentation conventions, alerting philosophy, and dashboard design patterns.
- Mentor engineers on the Observability team and act as a technical resource for SRE, Storage Engineering, and Network Engineering on observability practice.
- Lead design reviews for observability work and represent the team in cross-functional architecture discussions.
- Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions for observability and AIOps tooling, including data sovereignty and compliance considerations.
- Produce and maintain design documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records that make the platform operable and extensible by future contributors.

Observability Platform

- Own and evolve our metrics pipeline, including VictoriaMetrics, Prometheus, and the Consul-based service discovery layer that keeps scrape targets current as infrastructure scales.
- Own and expand our logging stack (OpenSearch, Logstash, and Filebeat) across all Backblaze data centers.
- Architect and expand distributed tracing with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, extending coverage beyond the current application instrumentation to new services.
- Define and maintain Grafana dashboard standards for infrastructure, storage, and application performance visibility.
- Drive expansion of internal application telemetry in partnership with application teams to improve visibility.
- Define capacity and retention strategy for the telemetry stack as the fleet grows.

Infrastructure & Automation

- Own infrastructure-as-code for observability stack deployments across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
- Write and review automated playbooks for configuration management and automation across Debian-based bare metal servers.
- Partner with the SRE team on Consul-based service discovery for VictoriaMetrics scrape target automation.
- Lead Ceph storage observability, including OSD health, performance metrics, and integration with alerting.
- Collaborate with the Network Engineering team on BGP, routing, and network-level observability.

Required Qualifications

- 8+ years in a systems engineering, SRE, DevOps, or observability-focused role, including demonstrated technical leadership on a platform or infrastructure team.
- Deep hands-on experience with Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, or equivalent metrics platforms, including PromQL, Alertmanager, and operating these systems at scale.
- Experience designing and operating log aggregation pipelines such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Logstash, Filebeat, or similar.
- Working knowledge of distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent), including instrumentation strategy, not just operation.
- Proficiency in Python and/or Go for automation and tooling.
- Experience with Kubernetes, including deploying workloads and understanding pod networking and storage.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling and configuration management.
- Strong understanding of Linux internals, with Debian/Ubuntu preferred.
- Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar on a team.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills. You'll work across engineering, SRE, security, and leadership, and you'll be expected to write design documents that drive decisions.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience leading the evaluation or deployment of AIOps tooling, including alert correlation, deduplication, or automated root cause analysis.
- Experience building, deploying, or operating AI agents or agentic AI systems. This is a strong differentiator.
- Familiarity with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI) or self-hosted LLM inference in an infrastructure context.
- Familiarity with Ceph storage, including OSD management, pool configuration, and CRUSH maps.
- Experience with incident management platforms.
- Familiarity with BGP, network observability, or working in multi-DC environments.
- Experience with secrets management in production environments.
- Experience operating in a regulated or compliance-driven environment.
- Prior experience in a storage-focused company or hyperscale infrastructure environment.

## What You'll Work On

- A telemetry stack spanning several data centers with exabytes of storage under observation.
- Real infrastructure at scale: Kubernetes, Ceph, Vitess, KVM, and a custom storage platform serving hundreds of thousands of customers.
- A collaborative team that values engineering excellence, transparency, and operational rigor.

Pay Transparency

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.

The expected salary range for this role is $178,000 - $200,000 plus 10% target annual bonus and RSUs.

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

## About Backblaze External Website

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Backblaze provides an independent cloud storage platform offering high-performance object storage, backup, and data management solutions to businesses and individuals worldwide.
- **Entity Type**: Public (ticker: BLZE on Nasdaq)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2007
- **Founders**: Gleb Budman, Tim Nufire, Billy Ng, Damon Uyeda, Casey Jones, Brian Wilson, Nilay Patel, Anuj Kumar (seven co-founders)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Cloud storage, data backup, and object storage infrastructure.
- **Target customers**: B2B and B2C – serving over 500,000 customers in 175 countries, including enterprises, SMBs, and individual users.
- **Mission statement**: “To make customers unstoppable by solving their toughest data storage challenges.”

## Products & Services
- **Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage**: S3-compatible object storage designed for high-performance AI workflows, data-heavy applications, media management, and data protection. Offers advanced features like Event Notifications.
- **Backblaze Computer Backup**: Automated cloud backup for personal computers and small businesses.
- **Backblaze Cloud Backup**: Enterprise-grade backup for servers and cloud environments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available in provided sources. As a public company (BLZE), current financials are available via SEC filings.
- **Key Metric**: Over 5 exabytes (5,053,404,320,000,000,000 bytes) of data storage under management; scaled with less than $3 million in outside funding until its 2021 IPO.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Minimal outside funding pre-IPO; no specific investors listed in provided sources. The company emphasizes its independence from hyperscaler clouds.
- **Growth Signals**: Remote-first global team; data centers in the US and Europe; expanding engineering and operations roles; growing customer base across 175 countries.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Independent cloud platform**: Not tied to the major hyperscalers, offering interoperability and freedom from lock-in.
- **S3-compatible API**: Simplifies integration with existing tools and workflows.
- **Engineered for efficiency**: Cost-effective storage built on a proprietary, lean infrastructure.
- **Sustainable business model**: “Rationally frugal” approach with focus on profitability and long-term success.
- **Cleverly unconventional culture**: Encourages novel solutions and simplicity.

## Strategic Focus
- Accelerating AI workloads and data-heavy applications with high-performance object storage.
- Expanding interoperability and advanced features (Event Notifications, S3 compatibility).
- Continuing to grow the remote-first, distributed engineering and operations team.
- Maintaining a sustainable, profitable growth trajectory.

## Why Work Here
- **Remote-first**: Work from anywhere in the US, Latin America, Europe, and Asia (India, Philippines). Great work can happen anywhere.
- **Culture and values**: Emphasis on transparency, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Values include “open communication,” “focus on easy,” “fair & good,” and “sustainable business.”
- **Benefits**: Comprehensive healthcare for family, dental & vision, 401(k) retirement plan, equity in a growing company, flexible paid time off, parental leave and reintegration support, learning & development program.
- **Engineering culture**: Teams include Site Reliability, Software Engineering (AI, backend, storage, security), QA, Developer Productivity, and more. Strong focus on solving complex storage challenges.

## Sources
1. [Backblaze Careers Page](https://www.backblaze.com/company/jobs)
2. [Backblaze About Page](https://www.backblaze.com/company/about)
3. [Backblaze Job Listings on Greenhouse](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/backblaze/jobs/5189029008)
4. [Backblaze LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/backblaze)

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