Senior Engineer - Observability

Company: United Airlines
Location: Chicago
Posted on: May 3, 2025

Job Description:

DescriptionUnited's Digital Technology team designs, develops, and maintains massively scaling technology solutions brought to life with innovative architectures, data analytics, and digital solutions.Find your future at United! We're reinventing what our industry looks like, and what an airline can be - from the planes we fly to the people who fly them. When you join us, you're joining a global team of 100,000+ connected by a shared passion with a wide spectrum of experience and skills to lead the way forward.Achieving our ambitions starts with supporting yours. Evolve your career and find your next opportunity. Get the care you need with industry-leading health plans and best-in-class programs to support your emotional, physical, and financial wellness. Expand your horizons with travel across the world's biggest route network. Connect outside your team through employee-led Business Resource Groups.Create what's next with us. Let's define tomorrow together.Job overview and responsibilitiesAs a Sr. Engineer, you will be a self-starter who is seen as a technical expert in Observability Engineering, responsible for building high performance next generation Observability systems. This will be accomplished with a combination of general application/environment understanding and building new engineering capabilities to improve and enhance existing distributed solutions to solve critical Observability Engineering problems for both cloud and on-premises. You will also participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation and be accountable for all aspects of IT Service Delivery, including incident, problem, and change management and ensure adherence to these processes, from coding to scaling applications, performance tuning and post-mortem analysis. Lastly, as the Sr. Engineer, you will drive thought leadership and function as an interim leader in the absence of the Sr. Manager, partnering with SRE and DevOps teams to define and implement observability and monitoring practices during the SDLC. The ideal candidate has deep technical expertise in Python/Java coding, Kubernetes and building cloud Observability Platform solutions.

• Collaborate proactively with interdisciplinary teams across the IT department to identify and mitigate unplanned application downtime and engage in thorough root cause analysis post-outage, improving system designs for automated troubleshooting.
• Partner with Application Development, Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps teams to continuously refine application instrumentation in order to maximize reliability and availability, enforcing best practices and enhancing system optimization, defining and implementing SLI, SLO and SLA.
• Continuously build upon knowledge of the assigned portfolio of applications to understand architecture, usage patterns, performance trends, outages, and business impact, creating strategies to proactively identify and report application performance problems and failures, detecting and preventing issues to mitigate operational risks.
• Be responsible for building Observability solutions towards the long-term goals, being a strong champion of Observability Principles.
• Consistently share best practices and improve processes within and across teams.
• Continuously monitor the production environment availability and take a holistic view of system health, service performance and availability, including real user monitoring, logging, distributed tracing and alerting for cloud and on-premise systems.
• Engage with project teams to guarantee that operational monitoring and instrumentation requirements are addressed by defining and implementing SLI, SLO and SLA during application deployment.
• Develop expert-level knowledge of Observability toolsets to maintain and enhance our Observability practices and solutions, improving the reliability, stability, and performance of the digital platforms by driving the implementation of fully automated telemetry capabilities to improve problem identification and service restoration through automated alerting and response systems with intelligent, self-healing capabilities.
• Serves as mentor to other team members to provide support and guidance in performing core functions, and in championing the adoption of Observability practices.QualificationsWhat's needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):
  • Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or relevant field.
  • 4+ years in an IT organization with experience in Observability and Monitoring solutions.
  • 4+ years of experience with Service Management for cloud in a medium to large IT organization.
  • Experience with distributed storage technologies such as EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), S3 (Simple Storage Service), RDS (Relational Database Service), VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), Lambda, and CloudFormation.
  • Proficiency with dynamic resource management frameworks (Kubernetes, Yarn).
  • Experience with AWS networking services like VPC, Route 53, and CloudFront, with understanding of cloud concepts like IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
  • Strong knowledge of Dynatrace APM (Application Performance Monitoring), including setup, configuration, and optimization. Familiarity with Dynatrace's AI-driven analytics capabilities, and Dynatrace extensions and plugins.
  • Proficiency with DevOps practices and tools (CI/CD pipelines, Jenkins).
  • Ability to code (structured and OOP) using one or more high-level languages, such as Python, Java, C# or JavaScript.
  • Understanding of API management and integration services like API Gateway, and experience with RESTful and SOAP APIs.
  • Dynatrace Associate Certification or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer required.
  • Must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without sponsorship.
  • Successful completion of interview required to meet job qualification.
  • Reliable, punctual attendance is an essential function of the position.What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):
    • 3+ years of experience with DevOps in a medium to large IT organization.
    • 2+ years of proven experience using Dynatrace, DQL and large enterprise experience is a plus.
    • 1-2 years of experience leading small projects or teams.The base pay range for this role is $109,820.00 to $149,600.00. The base salary range/hourly rate listed is dependent on job-related, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, education, and skills. This position is also eligible for bonus and/or long-term incentive compensation awards.You may be eligible for the following competitive benefits: medical, dental, vision, life, accident & disability, parental leave, employee assistance program, commuter, paid holidays, paid time off, 401(k) and flight privileges.United Airlines is an equal opportunity employer. United Airlines recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, veteran status and other protected status as required by applicable law. Equal Opportunity Employer - Minorities/Women/Veterans/Disabled/LGBT.We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions. Please contact to request accommodation.
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Keywords: United Airlines, Downers Grove , Senior Engineer - Observability, Engineering , Chicago, Illinois