What the job actually is

You make systems explicable: metrics, logs, traces, and the increasingly expensive question of which of them to keep. The reason this is becoming a standalone role is cost — telemetry volume grows faster than the systems producing it, and someone has to own cardinality, sampling strategy and the bill.

The parallel with evaluation is exact: observability is named in 42% of postings and titled in far fewer, which means most people assessed on it have never studied it deliberately.

Titles this hides behind

Prepare like this

• Understand cardinality properly. Why adding a user ID label to a Prometheus metric can cost six figures, and what you do instead.
• Know sampling strategies — head, tail, and why tail sampling is both what you want and operationally painful.
• Instrument something real with OpenTelemetry end to end, and be able to explain the collector's role.
• Have a cost story. Telemetry spend reduced without losing the signal that mattered — this is the interview's favourite territory.

Be ready for

Compensation