Lead Observability Platform Engineer

812ed792-1aae-4de0-b986-2ab8e417b320; Sydney; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Cox Purtell is seeking an experienced Lead Observability Platform Engineer in Sydney to design, build and run a high-velocity observability platform. You will own telemetry pipelines, dashboards, and incident response, driving reliability across the system under load.

The role emphasizes deep expertise in logs, metrics, traces and time-series telemetry, with responsibility for performance, cost and reliability in a mission-critical environment.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering experience in SRE, platform engineering, infra, observability or distributed systems.
• Ability to reason about failure modes and reliability under pressure.
• Technical depth across logs, metrics, traces, events, dashboards and telemetry.
• Have designed, built or operated services or tools relied upon by other teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate a shared observability platform (telemetry collection, ingestion, storage, query, visualization).
• Build services, APIs, integrations and dashboards to improve observability adoption and reliability.
• Improve scalability, reliability, performance and cost of high-volume telemetry systems.
• Enhance developer/operator experience with self-service workflows and platform abstractions.
• Own reliability including failure modes, monitoring, incidents and continuous improvement.

Skills

SRE

Platform engineering

Observability

Distributed systems

Reliability engineering

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Lead Observability Platform Engineer

Sydney | Full-time

Seek Selling Points

• You already know when the telemetry is lying before the dashboard ever admits it
• Attractive salary, real bonus, and a rewards package built for someone this good
• High-frequency, low-latency, mission-critical work, built for genuinely serious minds

About the Client

You'll be joining an organisation operating at the sharp end of technology: high-frequency, high-throughput, low-latency systems where speed, precision and reliability aren't aspirations, they're the job. Here, downtime or delay has a real, measurable cost, not just reputational noise. It's the kind of environment that suits people who've worked across high-stakes sectors, from finance, trading and gaming through to telecommunications and mission-critical government and defence technology, and who already know the difference between a system that's fast and one that's actually trustworthy. Sydney based, corporate, well-resourced, and built for people who want the hardest version of this job, not the easiest.

About the Role

You're the one who gets pulled into the incident channel first, not last. You've already built or fixed the observability platform other engineers rely on without thinking about it, and you know that's the whole point: it should be invisible until the moment it isn't. This role puts you in charge of that platform end to end, metrics, logs, traces, events, alerting and diagnostics, the layer that tells everyone else what's actually happening under load. You already treat observability as a trust problem, not a tooling problem. That instinct is exactly why this role exists.

Duties

• You'll design, build and operate a shared observability platform spanning telemetry collection, ingestion, storage, query, visualisation, alerting and diagnostics.
• You'll build the services, APIs, integrations and dashboards that make observability easier to adopt and more reliable to operate.
• You'll improve the scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness of high-volume telemetry systems.
• You'll improve developer and operator experience through self-service workflows, golden paths and practical platform abstractions.
• You'll own the reliability of what you build, including failure modes, monitoring, incident learnings and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• You've got strong engineering experience in SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure, observability, developer tooling or distributed systems.
• You already reason about failure modes, debugging workflows and service reliability under pressure, because you've had to.
• You have technical depth across logs, metrics, traces, events, alerting, dashboards and telemetry pipelines, not just familiarity.
• You've designed, built or operated services, pipelines or tools that other engineering teams depend on.
• You're comfortable with modern observability and telemetry tooling across metrics, logging, tracing and time-series systems, and you keep up with where it's heading.