IND - Manager, IT Engineering

Hartford is seeking an experienced and highly motivated Performance & Observability Manager to lead, strategize, and implement solutions for complex application and infrastructure observability needs, ensuring production stability and visibility. This role is accountable for driving performance and stability improvements across critical business applications, architecture, and integrations to deliver an optimal end-user experience. The manager will oversee a team to ensure delivery of observability and performance analytics aligned with organizational vision and goals. 

Responsibilities 

• Hands-on Leadership: Maintain a balance of responsibilities with approximately 80% technical execution in performance engineering and 20% managerial duties, including team leadership, mentoring, and stakeholder engagement.  

• Performance & Observability Strategy: Drive end-to-end performance and observability initiatives to ensure scalability, reliability, operational readiness, and effective incident/problem management.  

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with engineering, architecture, and operations teams to define performance benchmarks, troubleshoot bottlenecks, and implement best practices across cloud and on-prem environments.  

• Technical Oversight & Planning: Provide leadership in planning, prioritization, and resource allocation while maintaining a strong technical presence in solution design and delivery.  

• Application Stability & Optimization: Monitor application stability trends and proactively identify optimization opportunities to enhance system resilience and efficiency.  

• Incident & Problem Management Support: Collaborate with Incident and Problem Managers to facilitate root cause analysis (RCA) and recommend corrective actions (RCR) by leveraging engineering and tool expertise.  

• Strategic Alignment: Provide IT stability direction for strategic projects aligned with enterprise architecture and business goals.  

• Innovation & Automation: Develop strategies for cost-effective technical solutions, including automated self-healing capabilities to improve operational efficiency.  

• Roadmap Ownership: Lead the development and maintenance of operations-focused product and service roadmaps, ensuring alignment with organizational priorities and technology evolution. 

Qualifications & Skillset 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field. 

• 7+ years of IT experience in Performance Engineering or related roles; 5+ years hands-on experience with development and/or support functions in an ITIL delivery model; 3+ years experience leading a team within technology. 

• Expertise in Dynatrace, LoadRunner, and Splunk for performance analysis, alerting, and monitoring. 

• Strong proficiency in performance testing processes and automation. 

• Experience with cloud-native technologies, including containerization, microservices, and serverless computing. 

• Skilled in APM tools, application server instrumentation (Java), Real User Monitoring, and Synthetic Monitoring. 

• Familiarity with Agile, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering practices. 

• Exceptional communication skills (written, oral, presentation, and facilitation) with confidence to engage all organizational levels. 

• Ability to build strong relationships across teams and vendors, prioritize multiple inquiries, and influence without direct authority. 

• Proven analytical and problem-solving skills within high-performance teams. 

Preferred Certifications 

• Dynatrace Certified Associate 

• AWS Solution Architect – Associate 

• AWS Certified AI Practitioner or higher 

• Splunk Core Certified Power User 

• Splunk Core Certified Advanced Power User 

• Se