Principal Solutions Architect - Observability

Company: Elastic
Location: Washington
Posted on: January 7, 2026

Job Description:

As an Observability Specialist Solutions Architect at Elastic, you will play a pivotal role in shaping how customers leverage Elastics Observability solutions to achieve their business goals. You will act as a trusted advisor and technical authority, working closely with sales teams, customers, and partners to design and implement innovative observability solutions built on Elastic and OpenTelemetry standards. A successful Solutions Architect is deeply curious, continually learning, and driven to challenge the status quo. This role provides an opportunity to make a meaningful impact by helping customers tackle observability problems, enabling customers to harness the full power of Elastic Observability, and contributing to Elastic’s growth in this space DUTIES • Serving as the technical lead and trusted advisor to customers, partners, and internal stakeholders for Elastic Observability solutions with a focus on infrastructure monitoring (metrics), application monitoring (tracing), and logging. • Providing thought leadership and championing the evolution of OpenTelemetry with Elastic customers and inside the CNCF OpenTelemetry community. • Collaborating with sales and customer teams to understand customer challenges, goals, and environments, and designing tailored observability solutions. • Guiding customers in adopting observability standards to ensure compatibility and success with Elastic’s solutions. • Helping customers architect for high-fidelity observability at scale. • Leading technical discussions and demonstrations, showcasing Elastic’s Observability and GenAI capabilities. • Developing proof-of-concept solutions that highlight the value and impact of Elastic’s Observability offerings for customer use cases. • Developing instructional observability workshops for the field and customers. • Creating and nurturing relationships with key decision-makers and technical leaders within customer organizations. • Driving best practices for observability architecture, deployment, and operations with a focus on scale, performance, and cost efficiency. • Contributing to the evolution of Elastic’s Observability products, providing feedback from the field to Product and Engineering teams. • Representing Elastic at conferences, webinars, and industry events as a subject matter expert on Observability and OpenTelemetry. • Building and maintaining technical documentation and resources to support enablement efforts. • Developing and maintaining deep expertise in Elastic’s Observability solutions and OpenTelemetry standards, staying current with industry trends and advancements. • A light understanding of the cybersecurity ecosystem and the role security solutions play in modern DevSecOps WHAT YOU BRING • Deep expertise in OpenTelemetry, including significant contributions to its development or ecosystem. • A track record of success in a technical presales/consulting role—enough experience selling and implementing technology to earn your customer’s trust. • Experience building PoCs, inclusive of the technical skills required to develop exemplary custom services and stage typical supporting infrastructure, like Kubernetes, Kafka, Postgres across both self-managed and hosted environments. • An ideal candidate will have some practitioner experience using observability products as a SRE or developer. • Experience designing and presenting technical solutions related to Observability, OpenTelemetry, or AI technologies in a pre-sales or consulting capacity. • A demonstrable ability to articulate and sell the benefits of modern platforms, software, and technologies. • A real passion for being curious and a continuous learner. You are someone that invests in yourself as much as you invest in your professional relationships. • A history of successful customer relations where you developed an understanding of what made a difference, and devised architectures that helped meet a goal, tackle a problem, or outpace competitors. • An ability to influence. Have you more than once convinced a team you worked for, of an idea, technology, or architectural pattern? • The ability to inspire groups, both large and small. • A willingness to travel 30% within the region, as well as occasionally internationally

Keywords: Elastic, Potomac , Principal Solutions Architect - Observability, IT / Software / Systems , Washington, Maryland