Staff Observability Engineer

Details

Groq delivers fast, efficient AI inference. Our LPU-based system powers GroqCloud™, giving businesses and developers the speed and scale they need. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we are on a mission to make high performance AI compute more accessible and affordable. When real-time AI is within reach, anything is possible. Build fast.

Mission

Ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of Groq’s observability tools and services for provisioning and managing the full lifecycle of Groq hardware, software, and networking systems at massive scale.

The team

The observability team builds the monitoring and observability infrastructure and tooling that supports Groq’s inferencing hardware at massive scale, both in the cloud and our own datacenters. Our mission is to enable the reliability, scalability, and performance of Groq’s tools and service across a wide range of signals and appliances, to support teams in production excellence, and to evangelize technical and cultural best practices around alerting, instrumentation, debugging, SLOs, and on-call.

Responsibilities & opportunities in this role

• Build and maintain comprehensive observability systems at massive scale. Obsess about running high quality production systems with excellent uptime that engineers can trust.
• Constantly iterate on, maintain, update, automate, and dogfood your own systems. Put in place great monitoring of your own systems that can be used as best practices by the rest of the organization.
• Instrument Kubernetes clusters, applications, and datacenter infrastructure components such as switches, PDUs, environmental sensors, cameras, chillers, etc.
• Familiarity with and strong opinions on signals:
  • Effective canonical logging and cost control
  • Tracing expertise including context propagation, tail sampling strategies, attribute enrichment, querying
  • Metrics derived from a variety of systems such as hosts, kube-state-metrics, kubelet, IPMI, SNMP
• Be a teacher: advise teams on instrumenting their applications in a variety of languages (Rust, C++, TypeScript, GoLang), implementing sensible SLO and alerting strategies, as well as on-call best practices.

Ideal candidates have/are

• 4+ years of experience in observability as a core responsibility of previous roles.
• Deep understanding of cloud-native technologies and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) such as Terraform and Flux.
• Have instrumented large Kubernetes clusters and built operators.
• Expertise in standing up and running monitoring, observability, and alerting systems - OpenTelemetry Tracing and Collector, Grafana/Prometheus, PagerDuty, AlertManager, IPMI, SNMP, etc.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a focus on root cause analysis and mitigation.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills with the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering teams.

Attributes of a Groqster

• Humility - Egos are checked at the door
• Collaborative & Team Savvy - We make up the smartest person in the room, together
• Growth & Giver Mindset - Learn it all versus know it all, we share knowledge generously
• Curious & Innovative - Take a creative approach to projects, problems, and design
• Passion, Grit, & Boldness - no limit thinking, fueling informed risk taking

If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!

Compensation

At Groq, a competitive base salary is part of our comprehensive compensation package, which includes equity and benefits. For this role, the base salary range is $155,545 to $208,995, determined by your skills, qualifications, experience and internal benchmarks.