AHEAD is looking for a Senior Technical Consultant to help clients modernize how they observe, operate, and improve complex digital platforms. This is a hybrid consultant-architect role for someone who can lead discovery, shape strategy, design practical solutions, and help drive delivery from plan through execution.
The right candidate brings strong observability depth, a vendor-agnostic and prescriptive approach, and the ability to connect application performance, user experience, and business outcomes. You should be comfortable working across open-source and commercial observability ecosystems, guiding clients through current-state assessments, future-state roadmaps, and implementation programs that improve resilience, operational maturity, and developer experience.
Roles and Responsibilities
Lead client discovery sessions, assessments, and workshops focused on observability, telemetry, reliability, and operational maturity.
Define target-state observability architectures and roadmaps aligned to cloud, platform engineering, SRE, and AIOps initiatives.
Design and guide implementation of solutions across metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting, and incident workflows.
Help clients adopt modern telemetry practices using OpenTelemetry and related open-source, cloud-native, and enterprise toolsets.
Build or refine dashboards, alerts, service views, and operational integrations that improve visibility, context, and signal quality.
Improve alert quality, incident triage, escalation paths, runbooks, and post-incident feedback loops by connecting telemetry to actionable operational workflows.
Partner with engineering, platform, operations, and leadership stakeholders to align observability investments to business priorities.
Translate observability capabilities into measurable outcomes such as improved service reliability, faster incident detection and resolution, reduced alert noise, improved user experience, and stronger platform adoption.
Advise clients on telemetry governance, data quality, retention, cardinality, access, and cost optimization to improve signal value while reducing operational and platform waste.
Contribute to implementation planning, solution governance, documentation, enablement, and operational handoff.
Support adoption of modern integration patterns across observability, ITSM, incident management, collaboration, workflow, and AI-assisted operations platforms.
Provide hands-on technical leadership where needed, including configuration guidance, implementation oversight, design validation, troubleshooting support, and quality review of delivery outputs.
Mentor delivery teams and help build reusable patterns, accelerators, and best practices within the practice.
Experience
6+ years of experience in consulting, engineering, SRE, platform engineering, or operations with strong observability responsibility.
Hands-on experience with modern observability concepts across metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service health, and incident response.
Experience with Open Telemetry and familiarity with telemetry pipeline design, instrumentation patterns, and collection architecture.
Working knowledge of open-source observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Jaeger, or Elastic.
Experience with one or more enterprise observability platforms such as Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk, New Relic, Elastic, LogicMonitor, Honeycomb, Chronosphere, etc.
Strong understanding of Kubernetes, containers, cloud-native architectures, and at least one major public cloud platform.
Experience with Terraform, Helm, CI/CD pipelines, Ansible, or related automation and platform tooling.
Solid understanding of distributed systems, modern application architectures, and operational best practices across SRE, DevOps, or ITSM environments.
Experience defining service health models, SLIs, SLOs, alerting strategies, or reliability measurement frameworks that connect technical telemetry to operational and business outcomes.
Ability to lead client-facing conversations, structure ambiguous problems, and translate strategy into executable workstreams.
Demonstrated ability to operate in ambiguous client environments, identify the practical path forward, and communicate tradeoffs clearly across engineering, operations, and leadership audiences.
Strong written and verbal communication skills with both technical and executive audiences.
A continuous learning mindset and a collaborative approach to delivery and practice building.
Experience operationalizing error budgets, burn-rate alerting, production readiness reviews, or reliability governance practices.
Experience integrating observability with ServiceNow, incident management platforms, CMDB, or collaboration tools.
Experience with telemetry cost optimization, sampling strategies, retention policies, tagging standards, cardinality management, or observability governance.
Familiarity with platform engineering, internal developer platforms, service catalogs, golden paths, or self-service observability patterns.
Exposure to AIOps, anomaly detection, event correlation, automated remediation workflows, or MCP-enabled integration patterns for AI-assisted operations.
Familiarity with microservices, service mesh technologies, end-user monitoring, or digital experience monitoring concepts.
Generalist coding or scripting experience in languages such as Python, Java, Go, JavaScript, or .NET.
Nice to have
Skills Required
- 6+ years of experience in consulting, engineering, SRE, platform engineering, or operations with strong observability responsibility
- Hands-on experience with modern observability concepts across metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service health, and incident response
- Experience with Open Telemetry and familiarity with telemetry pipeline design
- Working knowledge of open-source observability tools
- Experience with one or more enterprise observability platforms
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures
- Experience with Terraform, Helm, CI/CD pipelines, Ansible
- Solid understanding of distributed systems and operational best practices
- Experience defining service health models, SLIs, SLOs, alerting strategies
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and executive audiences
AHEAD Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about AHEAD and has not been reviewed or approved by AHEAD.
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Retirement Support — 401(k) contributions are matched dollar-for-dollar on the first $5,000 each year, with matching made each pay period and immediate 100% vesting. This structure signals above-standard employer support for retirement savings.
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Affordable Benefits — Medical options include low employee premiums for PPO and HDHP plans, and the HDHP adds employer HSA funding plus a dollar-for-dollar HSA match up to stated amounts. Dental and vision plans list very low per-paycheck costs, helping keep overall healthcare spend manageable.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — No-cost telemedicine (including virtual mental health when enrolled), free Calm access for the employee and dependents, and an EAP with counseling are included. Company-paid life and disability plus voluntary protections (legal/ID, pet insurance) and other extras round out a comprehensive set of supports.
AHEAD Insights
What We Do
AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together cloud infrastructure, intelligent operations, and modern applications, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.
