Associate Director, Observability and Service Reliability

At Kyndryl, we run and reimagine the mission-critical technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. We are at the heart of progress; with proven expertise and a continuous flow of AI-powered insight, enabling smarter decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge. For our people-Kyndryls-that means doing purposeful work that powers human progress. Join us and experience a flexible, supportive environment where your well-being is prioritized and your potential can thrive.

The Role

Enterprise Observability Strategy

• Own and mature the enterprise observability and service reliability strategy.
• Define standards for monitoring applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms, networks, endpoints, APIs, databases, middleware, and other critical technology services.
• Establish expectations for metrics, logs, traces, events, synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring, digital experience, service health, and business transaction visibility.
• Create a consistent enterprise approach while allowing teams to use monitoring technologies suited to their platforms and services.
• Identify monitoring gaps, redundant capabilities, excessive alerting, and opportunities to improve visibility.
• Move the organization from traditional monitoring toward proactive, predictive, and automated operations.

• Establish and mature the organization's service reliability framework.
• Partner with technical service owners to define monitoring requirements for critical applications and services.
• Ensure monitoring reflects the complete service, including application performance, infrastructure, dependencies, integrations, user experience, business transactions, capacity, and failure conditions.
• Define minimum observability requirements based on service criticality and business impact.
• Help teams establish meaningful Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives, availability targets, performance thresholds, and health measures.
• Use reliability data, incidents, problem records, capacity trends, and telemetry to identify systemic weaknesses and prioritize improvements.

• Serve as the enterprise technical authority for observability, monitoring, and service reliability.
• Provide architectural guidance to application, infrastructure, cloud, engineering, DevOps, SRE, cybersecurity, and operations teams.
• Influence solution design so services are observable, measurable, supportable, and resilient by design.
• Develop enterprise monitoring patterns, reference architectures, standards, and reusable capabilities.
• Guide technical teams in selecting appropriate monitoring methods and technologies for specific platforms and use cases.
• Evaluate emerging observability, AIOps, automation, analytics, and service reliability capabilities for measurable operational value.

• Provide strategic oversight for the enterprise observability and monitoring tool ecosystem.
• Lead the strategy, architecture, governance, adoption, and optimization of major platforms, including Dynatrace, Nexthink, and related enterprise monitoring technologies.
• Ensure monitoring tools operate as an integrated ecosystem rather than isolated platforms.
• Establish standards for instrumentation, tagging, alerting, dashboards, integrations, service mapping, ownership, and data quality.
• Partner with technical teams to maximize platform value while reducing tooling duplication and complexity.
• Manage strategic technology and vendor relationships to ensure observability investments deliver measurable operational value.

• Provide strategic leadership for enterprise use of Dynatrace across applications, infrastructure, cloud, and digital services.
• Drive adoption of application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, real user monitoring, synthetic monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, logs, topology, service health, and intelligent problem detection.
• Partner with technical owners to improve application instrumentation and ensure Dynatrace provides meaningful service visibility.
• Use Dynatrace capabilities to improve root cause identification, dependency visibility, anomaly detection, and incident response.

• Lead the enterprise strategy for Nexthink and Digital Employee Experience.
• Provide visibility into endpoint health, application performance, employee technology experience, device reliability, and technology friction.
• Partner with Digital Workplace, Service Desk, application teams, and infrastructure teams to identify and remediate issues proactively.
• Use experience data to reduce support demand, improve employee productivity, and identify systemic technology issues.
• Expand automation and targeted remediation to resolve employee experience issues at scale.

• Improve operational signal quality by reducing noise and increasing alert relevance.
• Drive event correlation, enrichment, anomaly detection, automated diagnostics, and proactive remediation.
• Integrate observability platforms with ITSM, incident management, automation, collaboration, configuration, and operational data platforms.
• Develop capabilities that help support teams detect degradation earlier and understand business impact faster.
• Use AI, machine learning, analytics, and automation where they improve outcomes and reduce manual effort.

• Establish governance for enterprise monitoring standards, tooling, integrations, data quality, licensing, and adoption.
• Develop executive and operational reporting that provides insight into service health, reliability, performance, and user experience.
• Use service measures to identify reliability risks, guide investment decisions, and prioritize service improvements.

Key measures may include:

• Service availability and reliability
• Mean Time to Detect, Mean Time to Identify, and Mean Time to Restore
• Monitoring coverage for critical services
• Service Level Objective attainment
• Alert quality and noise reduction
• Proactive issue detection and automated remediation
• Digital Employee Experience
• Recurring service degradation
• Observability maturity
• Tool adoption and value realization

• Lead and develop observability, monitoring, reliability, and platform engineering professionals.
• Create an engineering culture focused on proactive operations, technical excellence, automation, and measurable service outcomes.
• Build strong partnerships with application owners, platform owners, infrastructure, cloud, network, cybersecurity, Digital Workplace, DevOps, SRE, Service Management, and business teams.
• Influence technical teams without relying solely on direct reporting authority.
• Create clear accountability for monitoring coverage and service reliability across the enterprise.
• Partner with Incident, Problem, Change, Major Incident Management, and Operational Resilience teams to improve detection, recovery, and prevention.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• 8 or more years of experience in observability, application performance, service reliability, infrastructure, cloud, engineering, or enterprise technology operations.
• 3 or more years of technical leadership or people leadership experience.
• Experience designing and operating monitoring and observability capabilities in complex enterprise environments.
• Experience with Dynatrace and familiarity with Nexthink or comparable Digital Employee Experience technologies.
• Knowledge of observability technologies, monitoring architectures, application performance management, infrastructure monitoring, event management, logging, tracing, synthetic monitoring, and user experience monitoring.
• Understanding of modern enterprise applications, cloud technologies, containers, APIs, networks, databases, infrastructure, and distributed architectures.
• Experience defining service health, reliability measures, Service Level Indicators, Service Level Objectives, and operational performance standards.
• Ability to influence senior technical leaders and translate complex technical concepts into business risk and operational outcomes.
• Strong leadership, architecture, analytical, problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

• Advanced Dynatrace experience in a large enterprise environment.
• Experience implementing or scaling Nexthink.
• Experience with ServiceNow and enterprise event management platforms.
• Experience with Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, AIOps, automation, OpenTelemetry, cloud native monitoring, and modern observability architectures.
• Experience establishing enterprise monitoring standards or observability reference architectures.
• Experience within complex, global, or highly regulated enterprise environments.