Engineering Manager – Observability
Bangsar South, W.P. Kuala Lumpur
|Hybrid
|Direct hire
|Job ID 7872|Posted Aug 1, 2025JOB DESCRIPTION
Engineering Manager – Observability
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
About Horizontal: Established since 2003 in the US, Horizontal solves complex challenges across two distinct businesses: Horizontal Digital and Horizontal Talent. We are consistently recognized for being a top workplace and one of the fastest growing private companies. Horizontal Talent specializes in staffing for IT, Digital & Creative and Business & Strategy markets. We have global offices in US, UAE, India, Malaysia and Australia.
About the role: We are seeking an experienced and visionary Engineering Manager – Observability to lead the development and management of a highly scalable, robust observability ecosystem. This role blends software engineering, systems thinking, and leadership to ensure critical data-intensive, distributed systems are observable, reliable, and continuously improving.
You will be responsible for building and scaling observability platforms that deliver real-time insights into system health, performance, and security. This includes logging, monitoring, tracing, alerting, and data visualization capabilities that empower teams to detect and resolve issues proactively.
You’ll collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, SRE, product, platform, and support teams to elevate system reliability and accelerate innovation across the organization's infrastructure landscape.
Responsibilities:
Team Leadership & Mentorship
Requirement:
Professional SkillsExperience with real-time data pipelines and streaming platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka).
Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
Familiarity with automation and IaC tools (Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines).
Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills across the full software stack.
Preferred Qualifications:
The above description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
About Horizontal: Established since 2003 in the US, Horizontal solves complex challenges across two distinct businesses: Horizontal Digital and Horizontal Talent. We are consistently recognized for being a top workplace and one of the fastest growing private companies. Horizontal Talent specializes in staffing for IT, Digital & Creative and Business & Strategy markets. We have global offices in US, UAE, India, Malaysia and Australia.
About the role: We are seeking an experienced and visionary Engineering Manager – Observability to lead the development and management of a highly scalable, robust observability ecosystem. This role blends software engineering, systems thinking, and leadership to ensure critical data-intensive, distributed systems are observable, reliable, and continuously improving.
You will be responsible for building and scaling observability platforms that deliver real-time insights into system health, performance, and security. This includes logging, monitoring, tracing, alerting, and data visualization capabilities that empower teams to detect and resolve issues proactively.
You’ll collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, SRE, product, platform, and support teams to elevate system reliability and accelerate innovation across the organization's infrastructure landscape.
Responsibilities:
Team Leadership & Mentorship
- Recruit and develop a high-performing, diverse engineering team.
- Provide coaching, technical guidance, and career development to team members.
- Foster an inclusive, collaborative, and growth-oriented team culture.
- Lead architecture design and implementation of observability platforms supporting high-throughput, distributed environments.
- Drive software engineering best practices across observability systems, ensuring scalability, performance, and security.
- Own the roadmap for observability tools including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and telemetry pipelines.
- Partner with Product, SRE, Development, and Platform teams to align on observability needs and integrate solutions into existing workflows.
- Act as a subject matter expert in observability across the organization.
- Stay ahead of industry trends in observability, monitoring, and reliability engineering.
- Promote continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and adoption of modern practices such as Open Telemetry and AI-driven observability.
- Lead initiatives for incident detection, root cause analysis, and system health monitoring.
- Drive automation for observability infrastructure and configuration management using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools.
- Maintain compliance and reliability in high-availability, multi-tenant environments.
- Define team objectives and OKRs.
- Conduct performance evaluations and provide structured feedback to support career growth.
Requirement:
Professional Skills
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields.
- Strong leadership, interpersonal, and stakeholder management skills.
- Passion for building inclusive teams and developing engineers.
- Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
- Customer-focused mindset with a strong emphasis on quality and reliability.
- Working knowledge of Agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery practices.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, ideally working with distributed systems.
- 5+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing observability or platform teams.
- Deep expertise in observability technologies such as:
- Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana)
- Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience implementing AI-driven observability or anomaly detection.
- Knowledge of large-scale, high-volume real-time systems.
- Exposure to regulated industries such as fintech or financial services.
- Experience running observability as a managed service within a multi-tenant environment.
The above description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.
Horizontal is proud to be an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.
We seek to provide employment opportunities to talented, qualified candidates regardless of race, color, sex/gender including gender identity and/or expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under federal, state or local law.
In addition, Horizontal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you need to request a reasonable accommodation in order to complete the application or interview process, please contact us.
All applicants applying must be legally authorized to work in the country of employment.