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Job details:

Role: Senior Dynatrace Observability Engineer / Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Location is Richmond, VA Hybrid(3 days onsite)

Duration: 12 months and possibly longer.

Job description:

Senior Dynatrace Observability Engineer / Subject Matter Expert (SME) with extensive hands-on experience designing, implementing, configuring, and optimizing enterprise observability solutions using the Dynatrace platform.

The ideal candidate will possess strong expertise in application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure observability, distributed transaction tracing, automated dependency discovery, digital experience monitoring, and AI-driven root cause analysis.

This individual will be responsible for establishing comprehensive visibility across complex enterprise environments, including applications, infrastructure, databases, integrations, and third-party services. The role requires the ability to correlate performance data across multiple technology layers, identify service dependencies, troubleshoot complex issues, and translate technical findings into actionable operational insights.

The successful candidate will work collaboratively with infrastructure, application, operations, and security teams to enhance observability capabilities, improve incident investigation, and establish proactive performance monitoring practices.

Key Responsibilities

Dynatrace Platform Architecture & Implementation

• Design, deploy, configure, and optimize Dynatrace observability solutions across enterprise environments.
• Implement and manage Dynatrace OneAgent, ActiveGate, and associated monitoring components.
• Establish monitoring strategies for applications, infrastructure, databases, and integrated services.
• Configure automatic discovery, monitoring policies, tagging, and logical environment segmentation.
• Implement best practices for platform scalability, performance, and operational efficiency.
• Evaluate existing monitoring configurations and recommend improvements to increase visibility and effectiveness.

Application Performance Monitoring & Distributed Tracing

• Implement end-to-end application performance monitoring across distributed enterprise applications.
• Configure distributed tracing to provide visibility into application transactions across multiple services, APIs, databases, and integrations.
• Identify application bottlenecks, service latency, transaction failures, and performance degradation.
• Establish performance baselines and identify deviations from expected application behavior.
• Analyze transaction flows to isolate performance issues and determine contributing components.
• Support monitoring of internally developed, commercial off-the-shelf, and web-based applications.

Infrastructure Observability & Dependency Mapping

• Configure monitoring for Windows and Linux servers, virtual machines, databases, and supporting infrastructure.
• Implement automated application and infrastructure dependency discovery and visualization.
• Leverage Dynatrace Smartscape and related capabilities to map relationships between services, processes, hosts, and applications.
• Identify upstream and downstream dependencies to support incident impact analysis.
• Establish visibility into resource utilization, infrastructure health, and service availability.
• Maintain accurate service relationships and dependency information to support operational troubleshooting.

AI-Driven Root Cause Analysis & Incident Investigation

• Leverage Dynatrace Davis AI and automated analytics capabilities to identify probable root causes of performance issues and service disruptions.
• Correlate application, infrastructure, transaction, and event data to support incident investigation.
• Analyze performance anomalies, service degradation, and unexpected system behavior.
• Determine relationships between technical events and their impact on dependent systems and services.
• Develop actionable problem detection and alerting strategies that reduce noise and accelerate incident resolution.
• Support complex troubleshooting efforts involving multiple applications, infrastructure components, and external dependencies.

Business Transaction & Digital Experience Observability

• Configure monitoring of critical business transactions and application workflows.
• Establish visibility into transaction success rates, failures, response times, and service availability.
• Implement Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Monitoring where appropriate.
• Monitor customer-facing applications and digital services to identify performance and availability issues.
• Develop dashboards and reporting that connect application performance with operational and business service outcomes.
• Work with stakeholders to identify critical application workflows and define appropriate monitoring requirements.

SaaS & Third-Party Integration Visibility

• Evaluate and implement monitoring integrations for supported SaaS applications and third-party services.
• Establish visibility into service availability, performance, and integration dependencies where technically supported.
• Monitor application interactions with external APIs and services.
• Correlate third-party service issues with application and business service performance.
• Identify observability limitations and recommend appropriate complementary monitoring approaches.

Change Impact Analysis & Performance Validation

• Establish monitoring baselines to evaluate application and infrastructure performance before and after system changes.
• Analyze the impact of operating system updates, application upgrades, configuration modifications, and infrastructure changes.
• Correlate deployment and change events with performance anomalies and service degradation.
• Support performance validation following maintenance activities and technology deployments.
• Provide objective operational data to assist with troubleshooting and change-related investigations.

Dashboards, Reporting & Operational Optimization

• Design and implement dashboards for infrastructure, application, service, and transaction visibility.
• Configure meaningful alerts, thresholds, and anomaly detection policies.
• Develop monitoring strategies aligned with service-level indicators (SLIs) and service-level objectives (SLOs).
• Utilize Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) and platform analytics to investigate performance issues.
• Optimize monitoring configurations to improve data quality, visibility, and operational effectiveness.
• Provide recommendations to improve mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).

Documentation, Collaboration & Knowledge Transfer

• Collaborate with application owners, infrastructure engineers, operations teams, and other technical stakeholders.
• Participate in technical discovery and requirements-gathering sessions.
• Develop platform architecture diagrams, monitoring standards, operational procedures, and configuration documentation.
• Provide technical guidance and recommendations regarding observability best practices.
• Conduct knowledge transfer sessions for engineering and operations personnel.
• Assist in establishing sustainable observability practices and operational processes.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in enterprise monitoring, application performance management, or observability engineering.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience deploying, configuring, and administering Dynatrace in enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated expertise with Dynatrace OneAgent, ActiveGate, Smartscape, and Davis AI.
• Strong experience implementing application performance monitoring and distributed transaction tracing.
• Experience configuring automated application and infrastructure dependency mapping.
• Strong understanding of application architectures, APIs, databases, and distributed systems.
• Experience monitoring Windows and Linux infrastructure and virtualized environments.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex performance issues spanning multiple infrastructure and application layers.
• Experience configuring dashboards, alerting, anomaly detection, and performance analytics.
• Working knowledge of Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) and modern Dynatrace analytics capabilities.
• Experience with digital experience monitoring, including Real User Monitoring and/or Synthetic Monitoring.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, documentation, and communication skills.
• Ability to independently lead technical investigations and collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Dynatrace Professional certification or equivalent demonstrated expertise.
• Experience with Dynatrace Grail and advanced analytics.
• Familiarity with business transaction monitoring and service-level observability.
• Experience monitoring commercial enterprise applications and third-party integrations.
• Experience with SaaS monitoring and API-based observability integrations.
• Knowledge of OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing standards.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or other cloud environments.
• Familiarity with ITSM integrations such as ServiceNow, Jira, or PagerDuty.
• Experience with automation and scripting using Python, PowerShell, or REST APIs.
• Understanding of DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and incident management practices.
• Familiarity with change impact analysis and performance validation methodologies.
• Understanding of security and network monitoring integrations as complementary sources of operational context.

Desired Outcomes

The successful candidate will contribute to:

• Improved end-to-end visibility across enterprise applications and infrastructure.
• More effective identification of application and service dependencies.
• Faster isolation and investigation of performance issues.
• Improved correlation between technical events and business service impact.
• Increased visibility into critical application transactions and user experience.
• More accurate assessment of performance changes following system modifications.
• Reduced reliance on manual troubleshooting and undocumented system knowledge.
• Improved operational efficiency through proactive monitoring and intelligent event correlation.
• Sustainable observability practices supported by documentation and knowledge transfer.