Cloud Observability Architect

We are seeking a Cloud Observability Architect to serve as a strategic advisor and facilitator, helping Tyler define how it measures, monitors, and understands the health of its cloud and SaaS platforms. The role will engage engineering, product, platform, and operations leaders in shaping a shared transition from traditional infrastructure-centric monitoring to a modern observability practice focused on application performance, customer experience, service reliability, and business outcomes.

Working through collaborative discovery, design sessions, and ongoing engagement with engineering, product, platform, and operations teams, the architect will help stakeholders establish enterprise observability standards, modernize tooling and processes, and build shared commitment to embedding telemetry, automation, and actionable insights throughout the software development lifecycle. The role will guide teams toward an application-first approach to observability, using application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, logging, metrics, and infrastructure telemetry to develop end-to-end visibility across Tyler's critical business services.

Success in this role will be measured by broad stakeholder adoption of agreed observability practices and by measurable improvements in service reliability, incident detection and resolution, operational costs, cloud investment efficiency, and visibility into the performance and health of Tyler's most important customer-facing applications and services.

Responsibilities: 

• Facilitate the development of Tyler's observability strategy by bringing stakeholders together around an application-first approach focused on application performance, service reliability, customer experience, and business outcomes.
• Partner with engineering and operational stakeholders to define, build, and evolve the enterprise observability architecture, using shared design principles and agreed telemetry patterns to promote consistency, scalability, and operational efficiency across the organization.
• Engage business and technology stakeholders in developing and maintaining an observability platform strategy that consolidates tooling, reduces complexity, and encourages adoption of enterprise standards while incorporating the needs and constraints of diverse business units.
• Serve as a trusted observability advisor to engineering, product, SRE, Cloud Operations, FinOps, governance, and executive leadership teams by listening to stakeholder needs, clarifying tradeoffs, facilitating decisions, and connecting groups around shared outcomes.
• Lead collaborative evaluations of observability technologies, frameworks, and practices; document stakeholder requirements and tradeoffs; develop recommendations; and help teams reach informed decisions that improve visibility across applications, services, platforms, and infrastructure.
• Drive the transition from infrastructure-centric monitoring to modern observability practices utilizing application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, metrics, logging, and telemetry analytics.
• Build alignment across stakeholder groups on enterprise observability principles, then help translate that agreement into standards, governance, architecture patterns, community engagement, and operational policies that establish observability as a core engineering discipline.
• Partner with engineering and operational teams to define and implement Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and reliability frameworks that support customer commitments, SLA reporting, and operational excellence.
• Convene engineering, operations, security, governance, and FinOps stakeholders to agree on telemetry collection, retention, alerting, and incident detection standards, balancing actionable insight, service reliability, alert fatigue, compliance, and observability cost.
• Collaborate with FinOps teams to optimize observability-related costs through effective telemetry management, data lifecycle practices, and platform governance.
• Facilitate a community of practice in which development, operations, and platform engineering teams share experience, surface concerns, jointly refine observability practices, and build peer support for adoption and continuous improvement.
• Manage strategic relationships with observability vendors and partners, influencing product roadmaps, evaluating emerging capabilities, and ensuring Tyler maximizes value from its observability investments.

Scope and Impact (Accountability)

• This position defines and advances Tyler's enterprise observability strategy, driving the adoption of modern, application-centric observability practices across cloud and SaaS platforms. The role establishes standards, governance, and architectural patterns that improve service reliability, accelerate incident detection and resolution, optimize telemetry investments, and reduce operational complexity.

Complexity

• The Cloud Observability Architect must demonstrate the ability to:
• Serve as a hands-on architect who can effectively balance strategic architecture, technical leadership, and implementation responsibilities.
• Design, implement, and evolve enterprise observability solutions across cloud and SaaS environments, with a strong focus on application performance, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Drive measurable business and technical outcomes while ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture standards, cloud governance frameworks, and operational policies.
• Lead complex initiatives and manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced, highly technical environment.
• Partner effectively with engineering, SRE, Cloud Operations, product, security, governance, and FinOps teams to gather requirements and translate business needs into scalable observability architectures.
• Establish and promote observability best practices, including application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, logging, metrics, alerting, telemetry management, and Service Level Objective (SLO) frameworks.
• Analyze operational data and telemetry to identify opportunities for improved reliability, performance, customer experience, and cost optimization.
• Build consensus and influence technical direction without direct authority by establishing shared goals, actively soliciting differing perspectives, making tradeoffs transparent, and documenting decisions and commitments across stakeholder groups.
• Provide strategic stewardship for enterprise technologies and platforms while developing shared ownership with engineering and operational teams for adoption, continuous improvement, and long-term evolution.
• Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership.
• Demonstrated understanding of change management and operational controls within regulated environments.
• Ability to operate within compliance frameworks and security standards, including PCI, CJIS, SSAE, and other applicable regulatory requirements.
• Will be required to successfully complete a fingerprint-based background check to support CJIS-related responsibilities.

Qualifications: 

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field; equivalent professional experience will be considered.
• 10+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Platform Engineering, Observability Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or Systems Engineering roles.
• 3+ years of experience architecting, implementing, and evolving enterprise-scale observability solutions within complex cloud, SaaS, or hybrid environments.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical transformation initiatives through coalition-building, stakeholder engagement, and shared decision-making, resulting in adoption of new engineering practices across multiple teams and organizations.
• Strong experience assessing existing monitoring and observability ecosystems, developing strategic roadmaps, and guiding enterprise technology decisions.
• Deep understanding of modern observability principles, including application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, logging, metrics, telemetry pipelines, and service reliability engineering (SRE) practices.
• Experience defining and implementing Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), reliability metrics, and operational performance frameworks.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures, microservices, and application-centric monitoring strategies.
• Experience operating within enterprise governance, security, compliance, and change management frameworks.
• Exceptional communication, facilitation, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills, with demonstrated ability to listen actively, synthesize differing perspectives, communicate tradeoffs, and build agreement among engineering teams, senior leadership, and executive stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, New Relic, Sumo Logic, Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, or similar technologies.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and enterprise telemetry standardization initiatives.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes, containers, cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, platform engineering, and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience establishing enterprise observability governance, communities of practice, architecture standards, or telemetry management frameworks.
• Experience partnering with FinOps organizations to optimize observability spend and telemetry-related cloud costs.
• Background supporting regulated environments, including government, public sector, payments, healthcare, or enterprise SaaS organizations.
• Experience designing, integrating, or implementing AI-assisted observability, AIOps, automated incident response, or intelligent operations workflows.
• Industry certifications in cloud platforms, SRE, observability, architecture, or related disciplines are desirable.