Engineering Manager, Tanzu Observability

Company: VMware
Location: Palo Alto
Posted on: May 3, 2021

Job Description:

The Elevator Pitch: Why will you enjoy this new opportunity?


You have an analytical mind and a genuine passion for the craft of software engineering.

You love solving problems, learning new technologies, and bringing a team together to accomplish amazing things.

Tanzu Observability by Wavefront offers many opportunities for applying your creativity and problem-solving skills to a cutting-edge cloud observability platform. We are a growing team developing a SaaS product that is used 24/7 by development and site-reliability teams at leading enterprises such as Lyft, Doordash, Reddit, Snowflake, Intuit, Box, Workday, and many more!

What is the primary need, technical challenge, and/or problem you will be responsible for?


We need someone who can manage a team and own the delivery of significant parts of the Tanzu Observability offering, especially related to Metrics, Alerting, and User experience.

You will be working as coach, cheerleader, design reviewer, product idea generator, or whatever other open-ended role needed to ensure the success of the group as part of its management team. Our group under Tanzu Observability works on high-scale data-ingestion, querying, and visualizations of metric, histogram, and event data streams. The group charter also includes making the creation and management of observability practices such as alerting, notifications, dashboarding, and root cause analysis using AI-driven insights intuitive and easy-to-use.

You will collaborate closely with Technical Architects, UX designers, and Product Managers to work on defining and achieving scalability goals and also to deliver simple and delightful user experiences for dashboards, alerts, notifications, and delivering AI-generated insights for anomaly detection and RCA (root cause analysis).

We are looking for someone who can closely work with frontend and backend engineers to prioritize, unblock, and deliver key software features as a part of our agile processes.

What differentiates us in the current observability landscape is our scalable and extremely powerful data platform and UI, and you will play a key role in taking our platform to the next level.

Success in the role: What are the performance goals over the first 6-12 months you will work toward completing?

You and your team will be responsible for delivering new features for Tanzu Observability by Wavefront around scalability and user experience. You should expect to hear customer feedback that your work has enabled them to do their work better!

You will work closely with frontend engineers on your team along with cross-functional team members such as UX designers, Product Managers, and backend engineers.

You will be expected to communicate complex concepts in technical and non-technical settings.

You will also be responsible for the identification and resolution of technical debt.

During non-pandemic times, we spent most of our time in VMware office and we hope to return to the office someday. Right now, were all completely remote and remote teamwork is increasingly important to us. You should be able to collaborate remotely via Slack/Zoom etc.


What type of work will you be doing? What assignments, requirements, or skills will you be performing on a regular basis?
As a key member of Tanzu Observability team,

You will be part of the leadership for a stellar team that has delivered a world-class platform for ingesting and querying different pillars of observability (metrics, histograms, events, etc.)

You will be responsive to customer and product asks and escalations and help prioritize engineering work, from whole initiatives to sprint tasks.

You should be doing regular 1:1 with your direct reports, discuss short term and long term goals and setting them up for success!

Being a people manager, you will also be responsible for compensation planning, performance bonus planning, retain talent by rewarding high performers on your team, and overall minimize attrition.

You will be responsible for Day-to-Day engineering activities such as sprint planning, measure the velocity of the team using story points.

You will also be closely working with your Product Manager counter-part to track the overall release status. Also, you will work with the PM to conduct Monthly feedback meetings so that voice of our customers is heard loud and clear while prioritizing new features.

You should have great communication and presentation skills.

You will also provide technical leadership and direction for our engineers.


We know from experience that not ticking every box on the skills sections stops many from applying. Please apply regardless of your self-assessment -- we want to hear from you! We have seen engineers succeed with a diverse range of skills and experiences.

What is the leadership like for this role? What is the structure and culture of the team like?


This role is for the Metrics Observability subgroup (out of 4) within Tanzu Observability. The leadership chain for Metrics Observability include a senior manager who has been with the Wavefront product since 2015, a senior engineering director who has been with Wavefront since 2018 and with VMware for over a decade, and a principal engineer who co-founded of Wavefront back in 2013.

Metrics Observability currently has more than 10 engineers and is still rapidly growing. We used to mostly work out of the Palo Alto office but have now fully adapted to remote work, with team leads and members in the SF Bay, Austin and Denver.

Culturally, the team is focused on innovation, customer value, execution, growth, and kindness. We retain the original startup DNA in our responsiveness and respect towards everyones contributions and focus on exciting big ideas, innovation, and features and fixes that deliver customer value. However, we have the stable backing VMware, which is itself a values-driven company and a great place to work!


What are the benefits and perks of working at VMware?
You and your loved ones will be supported with a competitive and comprehensive benefits package. Below are some highlights, or you can view the complete benefits package by visitingwww.benefits.vmware.com.

Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Medical Coverage, Retirement, and Parental Leave Plans for All Family Types
Generous Time Off Programs
40 hours of paid time to volunteer in your community
Rethinks Neurodiversity program to support parents raising children with learning or behavior challenges, or developmental disabilities
Financial contributions to your ongoing development (conference participation, trainings, course work, etc.)
Healthy and local inspired snacks in all our pantries
This position is eligible for TanzuChallenge referral campaign

VMware is an Equal Opportunity Employer and Prohibits Discrimination and Harassment of Any Kind:VMware is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at VMware are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, physical, mental or sensory disability, HIV Status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. VMware will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. VMware encourages applicants of all ages. VMware will provide reasonable accommodation to employees who have protected disabilities consistent with local law.

Senior Software Engineer - HCX

Senior UI Engineer (Sr. MTS) - Tanzu Observability (Remote Eligible)

Keywords: VMware, Palo Alto , Engineering Manager, Tanzu Observability, Other , Palo Alto, California