Staff Observability Platform Engineer
Nscale is hiring a Staff Observability Platform Engineer for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $190k-$260k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Nscale.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting lists this role as remote.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Kubernetes, Prometheus and Grafana.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 299 other open roles at Nscale.
AI in this role
Build and scale observability platforms and telemetry pipelines for GPU clusters and AI workloads.
About Nscale
Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale simplifies AI development while enabling superior results, supporting strategic business outcomes such as cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility.
We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you'll build trust through openness and transparency while contributing to the technology that powers the future.
About the Role
As a Staff Observability Platform Engineer, you'll play a critical role in building and evolving Nscale's observability platform, enabling deep visibility into GPU clusters, AI workloads, and the infrastructure that powers them.
You view observability as a product, not simply a collection of tools. You'll help define and implement scalable, reliable observability solutions that empower engineering teams to understand system behavior, diagnose issues quickly, and operate complex distributed systems with confidence.
You'll combine technical leadership with hands-on engineering, partnering across SRE, infrastructure, platform, and AI/ML teams to improve reliability, operational efficiency, and developer experience. You'll influence architectural decisions, establish engineering best practices, and help drive the evolution of observability capabilities across the organization.
This is a role for someone who enjoys solving difficult infrastructure problems, building platforms that scale, and helping engineering teams succeed through better visibility and operational insight.
What You'll Do
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Design, build, and evolve observability platforms across metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and telemetry pipelines.
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Lead the implementation of scalable observability solutions that support Nscale's growing GPU and AI infrastructure.
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Partner with SRE, infrastructure, platform, and AI/ML teams to ensure observability is embedded throughout the software and infrastructure lifecycle.
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Drive improvements in monitoring coverage, alert quality, service health visibility, and incident response effectiveness.
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Develop standards, frameworks, and reusable patterns that simplify observability adoption across engineering teams.
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Identify reliability risks and operational blind spots, helping teams proactively address them before they impact customers.
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Contribute to architectural decisions around telemetry collection, storage, retention, cardinality management, and performance optimization.
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Lead technical initiatives and projects that improve platform scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency.
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Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance through design reviews, code reviews, and knowledge sharing.
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Participate in incident investigations and postmortems, translating operational learnings into durable platform improvements.
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Evaluate new observability technologies and practices, balancing innovation with operational simplicity and long-term maintainability.
About You
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6+ years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, observability engineering, or related disciplines.
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Strong experience building and operating observability platforms in cloud-native, distributed environments.
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Deep hands-on experience with several of the following technologies: Prometheus, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Elastic, or similar platforms.
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Strong software engineering skills with proficiency in Go, Python, or equivalent languages.
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Experience operating and troubleshooting Kubernetes-based platforms at scale.
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Strong understanding of monitoring, logging, tracing, telemetry pipelines, and modern observability practices.
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Experience designing systems with scalability, reliability, performance, and operational simplicity in mind.
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Proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent.
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Ability to lead technical initiatives and influence engineering decisions across multiple teams.
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Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and align stakeholders around pragmatic solutions.
Preferred
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Experience operating observability systems in GPU, AI/ML, HPC, or large-scale compute environments.
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Familiarity with Slurm, Kubernetes GPU scheduling, or AI infrastructure platforms.
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Experience with high-volume telemetry pipelines and streaming technologies such as Kafka, Vector, or Fluent Bit.
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Knowledge of observability challenges related to model training, inference workloads, GPU utilization, and distributed AI systems.
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Experience mentoring engineers and helping grow technical capability across teams.
Equal Opportunities Statement
We strongly encourage applications from people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent individuals, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
If there's anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.
Note: Responsibilities outlined are not exhaustive and may evolve as business needs change.
The range below reflects the base salary for the position. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related factors such as skill set, experience, education, and location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus, equity, and/or commission programs. Nscale may offer a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible paid time off, parental leave, and retirement plan participation.
Salary Range$190,000—$260,000 USDFor information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here.
Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.
How we rate this
Staff Observability Platform Engineer at Nscale rates 80 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where observability was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where gpu clusters was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where infrastructure monitoring was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where sre was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Observability, Distributed Systems, GPU Clusters, Infrastructure Monitoring, and Sre. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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