Lead Observability Platform Engineer

Cox Purtell Staffing Services; Sydney; On-site; AUD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Cox Purtell Staffing Services is seeking a Lead Observability Platform Engineer in Sydney. You will own an end-to-end observability platform, including metrics, logs, traces, events and alerting, across high-throughput systems.

This is a high-stakes, mission-critical role requiring deep experience in SRE and platform engineering. You will design, build and operate services and dashboards, improve scalability and reliability, and enhance operator experiences with practical abstractions.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering experience in SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure, observability or distributed systems.
• Ability to reason about failure modes, debugging workflows and service reliability under pressure.
• Technical depth across logs, metrics, traces, events, alerting and telemetry pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate a shared observability platform spanning telemetry collection, ingestion, storage, query, visualisation, alerting and diagnostics.
• Develop services, APIs, integrations and dashboards to improve observability adoption and reliability.
• Improve scalability, reliability, performance and cost-efficiency of high-volume telemetry systems.
• Enhance developer and operator experience via self-service workflows and practical platform abstractions.
• Own reliability including failure modes, monitoring and incident learnings.

Skills

SRE experience

Platform engineering

Observability

Developer tooling

Distributed systems

Tools

Kafka

Grafana

ELK

OpenSearch

ClickHouse

VictoriaMetrics

InfluxDB

Telegraf

Vector

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Job description

• 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

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.

Desired Skills and Experience

• Lead Observability Platform Engineer
• Kafka
• Grafana
• ELK
• OpenSearch
• ClickHouse
• VictoriaMetrics
• InfluxDB
• Telegraf
• Vector
• OpenTelemetry
• Prometheus