Director – Enterprise Monitoring

To be considered for this position, applications and resumes are accepted only through our careers site by directly applying to the posted job. We do not accept unsolicited resumes or sales solicitations from staffing agencies. Any OCC employee wishing to submit a referral must do so through their Workday account. Any resume submitted outside of an active job posting will not be considered for employment.

What You'll Do:

Leads the enterprise monitoring function, owning the day-to-day management, health, and continuous improvement of the tools and practices that monitor Production systems. Ensures monitoring and alerting are aligned to the reliability standards and priorities set by the Executive Director, SRE, so SRE and partner teams have accurate, timely insight into system health. Manages the monitoring team, platforms, and vendor relationships to sustain enterprise monitoring coverage.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

Strategy and governance

• Define and execute the multiyear enterprise monitoring and observability strategy and roadmap, including target architecture, tooling direction and investment priorities.
• Own monitoring standards, coverage requirements, documentation and runbooks, and recommend changes to reliability standards to the Executive Director, SRE.
• Translate reliability standards and service level objectives (SLOs) set by SRE leadership into monitoring, alerting and dashboard configurations.
• Define monitoring readiness criteria and recommend that a release or change not proceed to Production when those criteria are not met.

Platform operations and resilience

• Manage the operation, maintenance and upgrades of enterprise monitoring tools and platforms to ensure they are available, performing and covering all Production systems.
• Ensure the resilience of the monitoring platforms themselves, including high availability, disaster recovery and monitoring of the monitoring tools.
• Extend monitoring coverage across infrastructure, networks, storage, databases and applications, including hybrid, cloud and containerized workloads such as Kubernetes and Kafka platforms.
• Maintain accurate service-to-infrastructure mapping with the owners of the configuration management database (CMDB) so alerts reflect business service impact and reach the correct support teams.
• Partner with Information Security so monitoring and log data supports security operations and enforce access control and log retention requirements on monitoring tools.

Alert quality and observability

• Own alert quality by tuning thresholds, reducing false and duplicate alerts, and ensuring alerts route to the correct support teams.
• Define service level indicators (SLIs) with SRE and development teams and implement SLO-based and business-service-level monitoring, including error budget reporting.
• Introduce event correlation, anomaly detection and other AIOps capabilities where they reduce noise and speed detection.

Engineering and automation

• Automate monitoring onboarding, configuration and reporting to reduce manual effort and improve consistency.
• Advance monitoring as code through infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform practices and integration with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines so new services are monitored by default.
• Maintain monitoring coverage standards and partner with Release Management and Change Management so new and changed applications and infrastructure are monitored before entering Production.

Incident, problem and change support

• Support Incident, Problem and Change processes by ensuring monitoring data is available during incidents and closing monitoring gaps identified in post-incident reviews.
• Serve as an escalation point for monitoring tools and alert behavior during Production incidents, including after-hours coverage in line with the on-call model defined with the Executive Director, SRE.
• Provide monitoring data, trend reporting and metrics to support SRE analysis of Production performance and capacity.

Reporting and measurement

• Define, track and report monitoring performance measures, including coverage, alert noise, mean time to detect and the share of incidents detected by monitoring.
• Surface monitoring risks, gaps, tool limitations and roadmap progress to the Executive Director, SRE and other senior leaders, including risk and governance forums as required.

Vendor and financial management

• Own the monitoring budget, including forecasting, business cases for new investment and approval of spend within delegated authority.
• Manage monitoring vendors, licenses and renewals; negotiate contracts and service level agreements (SLAs); and maintain exit and transition plans for critical tools.
• Identify opportunities to consolidate or rationalize tools and lead the resulting migrations and decommissioning.

Risk, audit and compliance

• Oversee remediation of findings and observations related to monitoring. Ensure remediation addresses root cause, improves OCC’s residual risk and is completed in a timely manner.
• Maintain evidence of monitoring controls and support internal and external audit and regulatory requests related to monitoring.
• Support OCC’s compliance with applicable regulatory expectations for system monitoring and operational resilience.
• Adhere to all Production security requirements, Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes and best practices.

Partnerships

• Partner with Production Support, Environment Operations, Platform Engineering, Application Development, Linux, Storage, Networking, Database Engineering, Architecture, and Business Operations to ensure consistent monitoring across technology domains

Supervisory Responsibilities:

Manages the enterprise monitoring team, including hiring, training, development, performance management, and work assignments. Builds team capability and succession depth and sets performance goals tied to the success measures below. Coordinates team schedules and coverage with SRE to support Production availability requirements. After-hours and weekend work may be required during maintenance windows and Production incidents.

Key Success Measures:

• Monitoring coverage of Production systems and services against the defined standard.
• Reduction in alert noise, including false-positive and duplicate alert rates.
• Mean time to detect Production issues, and the share of incidents detected by monitoring before users report them.
• Availability and resilience of the monitoring platforms.
• Timely remediation of audit and regulatory findings related to monitoring.
• Delivery of the monitoring roadmap and realization of tool rationalization savings.
• undefinedTargets are set annually with the Executive Director, SRE.

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

• [Required] Excellent oral and written communication skills, including the ability to explain technical monitoring information to nontechnical audiences and to coordinate cross-functional troubleshooting efforts and lead root cause analysis (RCA) processes to closure.
• [Required] Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex Production issues, perform RCA and drive long-term corrective actions.
• [Required] Effective incident management skills with a structured, analytical approach to problem solving.
• [Required] Experience partnering with development teams to shape architecture, define SLIs and SLOs, and embed reliability into services from design through operation.
• [Required] Experience presenting to senior leadership and governance forums and communicating risk clearly.
• [Required] Demonstrated ability to lead, develop and retain high-performing technical colleagues.
• [Required] Demonstrated experience leading tool consolidation, migration or modernization programs.
• [Required] Strong organization and time management skills with the ability to prioritize in a fast-paced environment.
• [Required] Understands the urgency of service level agreements and the need for timely responses.
• [Required] Ability to work in a high-intensity environment, including during Production incidents.
• [Required] Sound analytical, diagnostic and judgment skills.
• [Required] Ability to work effectively with technical colleagues, business partners and vendors.
• [Required] Builds partnerships across the company and influences peers and colleagues to achieve results.
• [Required] Optimizes the use of available resources and approaches issues with pragmatism.

Technical Skills:

• [Required] Deep, hands-on knowledge of enterprise monitoring tools, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management and event management platforms.
• [Required] Strong understanding of monitoring and observability ecosystems, including but not limited to Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, Prometheus, Logic Monitor, Grafana, ELK/EFK and OpenTelemetry.
• [Required] Hands-on experience with tracing and logging backends such as Tempo/Jaeger, Loki/Elastic/Splunk, CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray.
• [Required] Experience with Kubernetes and Kafka observability, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) metrics, kube-state-metrics, consumer lag and broker health.
• [Required] Fluency in the Golden Signals and in the RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) and USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) methods as applied frameworks for monitoring and alerting design.
• [Required] Experience designing and tuning alerts, thresholds, dashboards and metrics.
• [Required] Working knowledge of observability concepts, including SLIs, SLOs and distributed tracing.
• [Required] Experience with automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Chef, Ansible and Terraform, as well as structured data formats such as JSON and YAML, applied to monitoring configuration, onboarding and reporting.
• [Required] Understanding of client-server relationships, network concepts, stack trace analysis (including Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) dumps, heap dumps, CPU and memory analysis and thread dumps), logging and monitoring tools, high availability and business continuity planning.
• [Required] Understanding of how servers, networks, storage, databases and applications are monitored.
• [Required] Working knowledge of ITIL principles, particularly Event, Incident and Problem Management.
• [Required] Experience with vendor, license and budget management, including contract negotiation and vendor performance management.
• [Preferred] Experience with telemetry pipeline tools such as Fluent Bit, Vector or Cribl for routing, sampling, redaction and cost control.
• [Preferred] Experience with synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM) and observability based on extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF).
• [Preferred] Experience with event correlation, anomaly detection or AIOps capabilities.
• [Preferred] Familiarity with CMDB and service mapping practices.
• [Preferred] Knowledge of the Clearing and Finance industry and its regulatory expectations for operational resilience.

Education and/or Experience:

• [Required] Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and work experience
• [Required] 10+ years’ experience in Production systems operations or monitoring, including at least 5 years focused on enterprise monitoring
• [Required] At least five (5) years’ experience managing technical teams

Certificates or Licenses:

• [Preferred] ITIL certification.
• [Preferred] Splunk, Dynatrace, AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification.

About Us

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) is the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization. Founded in 1973, OCC is dedicated to promoting stability and market integrity by delivering clearing and settlement services for options, futures and securities lending transactions. As a Systemically Important Financial Market Utility (SIFMU), OCC operates under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. OCC has more than 100 clearing members and provides central counterparty (CCP) clearing and settlement services to 23 exchanges and trading platforms. More information about OCC is available at www.theocc.com.

Benefits

A highly collaborative and supportive environment developed to encourage work-life balance and employee wellness. Some of these components include:

• A hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance
• Technology Stipend allowing you to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely
• Generous PTO and Parental leave
• 401k Employer Match
• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental and vision

Visit https://www.theocc.com/careers/thriving-together for more information.

Compensation

• The salary range listed for any given position is exclusive of fringe benefits and potential bonuses. If hired at OCC, your final base salary compensation will be determined by factors such as skills, experience and/or education.
• In addition, we believe in the importance of pay equity and consider internal equity of our current team members as part of any final offer.
• We typically do not hire at the maximum of the range in order to allow for future and continued salary growth. We also offer a substantial benefits package as noted on www.theocc.com/careers
• All employees may be eligible for a discretionary bonus. Discretionary bonuses are based on various factors, including, but not limited to, company and individual performance and are not guaranteed.

Salary Range

$174,300.00 - $255,500.00

Incentive Range

23% to 30%

This position is eligible for an annual discretionary incentive compensation award, for which the target range is listed above (see Incentive Range). The amount of such award, if any, will be based on various factors, including without limitation, both individual and company performance.

Step 1
When you find a position you're interested in, click the 'Apply' button. Please complete the application and attach your resume.  

Step 2
You will receive an email notification to confirm that we've received your application.

Step 3
If you are called in for an interview, a representative from OCC will contact you to set up a date, time, and location. 

For more information about OCC, please click here.

OCC is an Equal Opportunity Employer