Observability Platform Team Lead at Gong

Gong, the maker of a revenue AI platform for sales teams, is looking for an Observability Platform Team Lead in Tel Aviv. This person leads the team building Gong's telemetry foundation: the instrumentation standards, pipelines and tools that let engineering teams find, investigate and fix production problems quickly. It suits a practical backend engineer with a history of leading OpenTelemetry adoption, someone who treats observability as part of system design rather than an add-on.

What you will do

• Lead, mentor and grow the team, encouraging ownership, curiosity and operational excellence.
• Set the strategy and standards for how services produce logs, metrics and traces, with conventions and defaults that teams will actually want to adopt.
• Drive OpenTelemetry instrumentation across the Java and Spring Boot services, covering SDKs, auto-instrumentation, Collector architecture and context propagation.
• Take responsibility for the reliability, scale and cost of telemetry pipelines across several vendors.
• Turn large amounts of telemetry into useful insight by raising alert quality, reducing alert fatigue and holding down both cost and cardinality.
• Decide how PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka and OpenSearch are monitored, so problems surface before customers see them.
• Make it quick to follow a fault across services, queues and data stores.
• Shorten detection and recovery times, with well-defined SLOs and SLIs for the services that matter most.
• Provide libraries, templates and self-service tools that give product teams observability by default.
• Bring SRE practices into R&D, such as error budgets, SLOs and a sustainable on-call.

What you need

• 8+ years of hands-on engineering, including 2+ years leading engineers, whether formally or as a tech lead.
• Deep practical backend experience building large distributed systems.
• Direct experience with OpenTelemetry: manual and automatic instrumentation, the collector, OTLP, semantic conventions and propagating trace context.
• A firm grasp of SRE basics: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, how to approach alerting and how to respond to incidents.
• Knowledge of the main health signals for common data stores and messaging systems, and how to monitor them properly.
• Comfort with AWS and Kubernetes, and experience with observability backends, whether open-source or commercial.
• A product mindset toward observability: finding out what engineering teams need, influencing them without direct authority and driving adoption.
• The ability to balance quick wins against long-term architecture, with as much attention on cost as on coverage.
• A Bachelor's in Software Engineering, Computer Science or another related technical subject.

Nice to have

• Java and Spring Boot experience, which the company calls a strong advantage.