Lead Observability Engineer

Tria; City Of London; On-site; GBP 111,000 - 148,000; Full time

Job summary

Tria in London is seeking a Senior Observability Engineer / SRE Lead to assess and define observability roadmaps across a complex hybrid estate. You will map telemetry sources, monitoring tools, dashboards and ownership across services, platforms, infrastructure and networks.

In this contract role, you will deliver meaningful service health views, identify telemetry gaps and implement pragmatic improvements.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading enterprise-scale observability initiatives.
• Hands-on Grafana, Grafana Cloud, OpenTelemetry and modern telemetry pipelines.
• Deep understanding of metrics, logs, traces, SLIs, SLOs and error budgets.
• Experience designing observability across cloud and on-prem platforms.
• Strong knowledge of Azure observability tooling (Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights).

Responsibilities

• Discover and document existing telemetry sources, monitoring tools, dashboards and ownership.
• Work with technical teams and suppliers to gain access to telemetry.
• Deliver meaningful dashboards and service health views.
• Identify gaps in telemetry, monitoring and alerting and implement improvements.
• Define health indicators for critical business journeys.
• Introduce modern observability practices (SLIs, SLOs, burn-rate alerting).
• Develop a roadmap for OpenTelemetry adoption.
• Assess options for a centralised telemetry platform (Grafana Cloud).
• Evaluate tooling rationalisation, operating costs and telemetry economics.
• Define an observability target architecture, standards and implementation roadmap.

Skills

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Telemetry pipelines

SLIs & SLOs

Error budgets

Cloud & on-prem

Leadership

Tools

Grafana Cloud

Azure Monitor

Log Analytics

Application Insights

Distributed tracing

Job description

Location: London, onsite 3 days per week (Sheffield as an alternative)

Rate: £tbd/day inside IR35

Duration: 6 months+

Are you a Senior Observability Engineer / SRE Lead, with demonstrable experience of assessing and defining observability and monitoring roadmaps within enterprise scale environments?

The Lead Observability Engineer / SRE Lead will be required to assess a complex hybrid estate, understand how services, platforms, infrastructure and networks should be monitored, and work across multiple internal teams, partners and suppliers to build a consolidated view of existing telemetry, monitoring and alerting capabilities.

As well as short term tactical objectives, the role will also be focussed on longer term strategic ones.

Responsibilities

• Discover and document existing telemetry sources, monitoring tools, dashboards and ownership
• Work with technical teams and suppliers to gain access to telemetry
• Deliver meaningful dashboards and service health views
• Identify gaps in telemetry, monitoring and alerting coverage and implement pragmatic improvements
• Define health indicators for critical business journeys
• Introduce modern observability practices where practical, including SLIs, SLOs and a roadmap towards burn-rate alerting
• Develop a roadmap for OpenTelemetry adoption
• Assess options for a centralised telemetry platform, including Grafana Cloud
• Evaluate tooling rationalisation opportunities, operating costs and telemetry economics
• Define an observability target architecture, standards and implementation roadmap

Requirements

• Proven experience leading enterprise-scale observability initiatives
• Strong hands‑on expertise with Grafana, Grafana Cloud, OpenTelemetry and modern telemetry pipelines
• Deep understanding of metrics, logs, traces, distributed tracing, alerting, SLIs, SLOs and error‑budget concepts
• Experience designing observability solutions across cloud PaaS, IaaS, on‑premises, legacy and third‑party hosted platforms
• Strong knowledge of Azure observability tooling, including Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and Application Insights

Lead Observability Engineer / SRE Lead / Lead Site Reliability Engineer