Lead Observability Engineer

The Opportunity

We are looking for an experienced Lead Observability Engineer to take ownership of the development and evolution of observability capabilities within a large, complex organisation undergoing significant digital transformation.

This is an exciting opportunity to shape and deliver an enterprise wide observability strategy, improving service reliability, operational visibility and engineering effectiveness across a diverse technology landscape spanning cloud, SaaS, hosted and on premises environments.

You will play a key role in defining technical strategy, architecture, standards and best practices, while working closely with engineering, cloud platform, technology operations and cyber security teams to embed observability into modern engineering practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the development and implementation of the organisation's observability strategy, roadmap and operating model.

• Define observability architecture, technical standards and reusable engineering patterns across multiple platforms and services.

• Establish effective monitoring, telemetry, dashboards and alerting capabilities to improve service health and operational performance.

• Develop approaches for Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and service health measurement.

• Drive the adoption of observability best practices across engineering and product teams.

• Build reusable automation, templates and reference implementations to support consistent observability practices.

• Embed observability into CI/CD pipelines, DevOps processes and the wider software development life cycle.

• Collaborate with engineering, architecture, cloud platform and security teams to deliver scalable, secure and resilient solutions.

• Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to engineers and technical specialists.

• Identify opportunities to improve service reliability, incident detection, troubleshooting and operational efficiency.

Skills & Experience Required

• Strong technical leadership experience within Observability, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform Engineering or DevOps.

• Proven experience designing, implementing or leading observability capabilities across complex technology environments.

• Strong understanding of monitoring, logging, metrics, distributed tracing, telemetry and alerting.

• Experience defining technical strategies, architecture standards and engineering best practices.

• Knowledge of modern cloud architectures, distributed systems, APIs and infrastructure as code.

• Strong experience with DevOps practices, automation and CI/CD pipelines.

• Experience improving service reliability, incident management and operational performance.

• Ability to influence technical stakeholders and drive engineering standards across multiple teams.

• Excellent communication, problem solving and technical leadership skills.

Desirable Experience

• Hands-on experience with observability technologies such as Splunk, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, Elastic, Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics or Azure Monitor.

• Experience implementing SRE principles and service reliability frameworks.

• Background in central platform engineering, engineering enablement or centre of excellence functions.

• Experience working across hybrid cloud and on premises environments.

• Experience within large, complex or highly regulated organisations.

This is a fantastic opportunity to take a leading role in shaping a strategic engineering capability within an organisation investing in its digital services and technology landscape.

You will have the opportunity to influence technical direction, introduce modern observability practices and work with experienced engineering teams to improve the reliability and performance of critical digital services.

If you're an experienced Observability Engineer or technical leader looking for an opportunity to make a genuine impact, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply now or get in touch to find out more.