Platform Engineer - Observability

Job Description

Job Description

Company Description

Why Wellmark : We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, and we’ve built our reputation on over 80 years’ worth of trust. We are not motivated by profits. We are motivated by the well-being of our friends, family, and neighbors–our members. If you’re passionate about joining an organization working hard to put its members first, to provide best-in-class service, and one that is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying today!

Why Wellmark Technology?  Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning the outcome, and driving organizational change to transform how we work.

Job Description

The Observability Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining observability platform tools and frameworks that enable development and operations teams to monitor and improve the performance, availability, and reliability of systems. This role involves designing and implementing systems that monitor and analyze the performance / health of software applications and infrastructure, ensuring high availability and reliability. The engineer will collaborate closely with development, site reliability engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to deliver a seamless observability ecosystem. Key responsibilities include architecting observability platforms, integrating monitoring tools into software pipelines, ensuring system health visibility, reducing mean time to detection (MTTD), and promoting a culture of proactive monitoring and reliability engineering.

What you will own :

Design, build, and maintain observability platforms with reusability across services in mind.

Develop scalable, automated pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and visualizing telemetry data.

Integrate observability tools (e.g., Dynatrace, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry) with existing infrastructure and applications.

Enable root cause analysis through correlation of metrics, logs, and traces.

Analyze telemetry data to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation for improved efficiency

Define SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets with stakeholders for critical services.

Improve incident response by enhancing monitoring dashboards, alerts, and automated notifications.

Qualifications

Preferred :

• 3–5 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Observability / Monitoring engineering roles.
• Proven experience building or administering observability platforms in production environments.
• Track record of improving system reliability and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
• Hands-on experience with one or more observability platforms : Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Elastic Stack, Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Honeycomb.
• Strong knowledge of observability concepts : metrics, logs, traces, SLOs / SLIs, error budgets.
• Experience working within an Agile team environment
• Experience deploying and maintaining Open Telemetry-based observability pipelines.
• Prior experience working in highly regulated environments with compliance observability needs.
• Contributions to observability open-source projects.
• Familiarity with chaos engineering practices to validate monitoring and resilience.
• Certifications from AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud
• Demonstrated experience coaching / mentoring others by providing guidance and feedback to help an employee or groups of employees strengthen their knowledge and skills to accomplish a task or solve a problem
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a strong analytical mindset.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical topics to both engineers and business stakeholders.
• Proven experience with designing technical architecture and keeping abreast of existing and emerging technologies.
• Experiencing consulting with stakeholders to understand needs with the intention of providing advice and counsel. Also interacting appropriately with others to guide individuals or groups to accomplish work, reach consensus, or take action.
• Proficiency in programming or scripting languages (Python, Go, Java, Bash, etc.) for observability automation.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Deep knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), observability / monitoring services, operating systems (Windows / Linux), networking, and containerization.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native architectures.
• Proficiency in CI / CD pipelines and how observability integrates into DevOps workflows.
• Knowledge of incident management and on-call practices.
• Experience with supporting observability and monitoring for Artificial Intelligence agents

Required :

Additional Information

a.  Lead the technical designs for highly integrated complex application platforms to optimize security, information leverage and re-use, integration, performance, and availability and ensure solutions developed adhere and aligns to the architecture standards. Fulfill service level agreements and ensure solutions remains current with industry best practices, technologies and with Wellmark’s standards.

b.  Consult with Solution Architects and project teams in the creation & documentation of design deliverables for application platforms.  Collaborate with Solution and Lead Architects to design and implement effective technology solutions, while using innovative business and technology processes to identify and implement improvement initiatives, eliminate redundancies and maximizes re-use of applications.

c.  May oversee and lead planning, developing and estimating of technical solutions. When appropriate, collaborate and work with other technical teams to better provide subject matter expertise and insights.

d.  Collaborate with Lead Architect for assigned domain, business systems analyst and other stakeholders to provide insight / direction regarding process improvements.

e.  Consults with business stakeholders regarding subject matter knowledge related to technical planning in order to ensure architectures are developed in alignment with business expectations.

f.  Oversee, review and provide technical guidance on the design efforts of Wellmark’s supported solutions; including but not limited to the evaluation of vendors during the selection process, integrating with new vendors, design, implementation and administration.

g.  Will adhere and are held accountable for the support and influence of Wellmark’s architecture governance standards and technical standards. Provide design specifications to governing boards for proper approvals. Provides guidance for regarding IT policies, security and infrastructure.

h.  Will provide training and mentorship of others regarding technical design and solution implementation; including review and quality assurance.

i.  Build strong relationships and business acumen with the business to ensure technical designs are aligned with business needs.  Provide exceptional customer service and solutions.

j.  Develops and applies industry best practice technology, design and methodology approaches to design platform specific technical designs. Researches and recommends new emerging technologies, techniques and tools that will add value to the organization.

k.  Other duties as assigned.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

An Equal Opportunity Employer

The policy of Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is to recruit, hire, train and promote individuals in all job classifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by law.

Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability at any stage of the employment application process should contact us at careers@wellmark.com

Please inform us if you meet the definition of a "Covered DoD official".

At this time, Wellmark is not considering applicants for this position that require any type of immigration sponsorship (additional work authorization or permanent work authorization) now or in the future to work in the United States. This includes, but IS NOT LIMITED TO : F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, L-1, J-1, etc. For additional information around work authorization needs please refer to the following resources : Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants