Observability Engineers build the platform that lets engineers understand what production systems are doing — logs, metrics, traces, profiling, SLO tooling. The role specialises within Platform / SRE and is increasingly distinct as observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, eBPF) become more sophisticated.
Salary by Experience Level
Junior
$110,000 – $145,000
per year
Mid-Level
$150,000 – $210,000
per year
Senior
$220,000 – $320,000
per year
Required Skills
OpenTelemetry (instrumentation + collector)Prometheus + GrafanaLoki / Tempo / MimirDatadog / Honeycomb / New ReliceBPF (Pixie, Parca, Cilium)SLO design and burn-rate alertsDistributed tracing patternsCost optimisation for observability