Director, Observability Engineering

Director, Observability Engineering

We are seeking a Director, Observability Engineering to lead engineering teams responsible for our edge agents, network and infrastructure telemetry pipelines, alerting, dashboarding, and fleet control plane. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, this role is focused on delivering scalable, reliable, and innovative products built on the Orb observability platform. The ideal candidate will bring strong executional pace and a passion for building teams that move quickly and thoughtfully, while tackling complex challenges in distributed systems and high-volume data processing.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering teams focused on network and infrastructure observability, telemetry, monitoring products, and fleet-managed agents.

• Provide leadership and guidance for the architecture and evolution of our observability platform, empowering technical leads to own detailed design decisions while ensuring scalability, resilience, and data quality.

• Guide and grow international teams across telemetry ingestion, real-time analytics, visualization, and agent management.

• Drive excellence in how we ingest, store, and analyze massive network and telemetry data streams.

• Support team operations including backlog management, technical planning, and delivery execution.

• Foster a data-driven culture focused on rapid innovation, prototype-driven engineering, performance, and reliability.

• Collaborate across product, design, and platform engineering teams to ensure alignment.

Requirements

• Strong people leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring senior engineers.

• Experience leading cross-functional engineering teams across multiple international locations.

• 10+ years in engineering, including 5+ years in managing technical teams and 5+ years in a startup environment.

• A proven ability to move quickly through problem-solving cycles with strong judgment around where to be meticulous and where to optimize for speed.

• History of delivering and finishing projects rapidly, with clear examples of high-output execution and momentum.

• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the ability to collaborate across engineering and go-to-market functions.

• Deep expertise in networking and infrastructure, distributed systems, observability, data pipelines, or network telemetry.

• Proficiency in cloud-native architectures, data storage, and streaming technologies.

Nice to Have

• Experience with both traditional technologies such as syslog, DPI, IPMI, DNS, BGP, SNMP, NetFlow/ sFlow and newer technology such as gNMI, gRPC, eBPF, and streaming telemetry

• Familiarity with agent-based architectures, remote updates, and fleet management.

• Familiarity with Grafana, Postgres, ClickHouse, Kafka, Elastic, or similar systems for telemetry and analytics.

• Familiarity with Golang, Python, and distributed data systems.

• Experience with AI/ML-driven observability or anomaly detection.

• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and related standards.

Our culture and values: 

• We own and solve problems with high attention to detail.

• Our open source contributors, users, customers & team are all part of our community. When our community wins, we win.

• We prioritize simplicity and think twice before adding complexity

• Clear communication helps keep our team aligned and collaborating smoothly.

About NetBox Labs:

NetBox Labs helps companies build and manage complex networks. We help customers accelerate network automation by delivering open, composable products and supporting the network automation community.

NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of open source NetBox, the world’s most popular network source of truth, and Orb, the next-generation open source network observability platform. Our products include NetBox Enterprise, a fully supported self-managed NetBox with advanced features, and NetBox Cloud, a secure, scalable, and reliable SaaS edition of NetBox.

NetBox powers thousands of companies, and NetBox Labs is backed by investment from Notable Capital (formerly GGV), Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Flybridge, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, and Mango Capital.