Lead Observability Engineer

TRIA Recruitment Limited; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

TRIA Recruitment Limited in London is seeking a Senior Observability Engineer / SRE Lead to assess and shape observability roadmaps across an enterprise-scale hybrid estate. The role is based in London with an onsite pattern (3 days/week) and a Sheffield alternative, for a 6 months+ contract.

You will document telemetry sources, define dashboards and health indicators, and drive OpenTelemetry adoption, Grafana Cloud, and modern telemetry practices across cloud and on-prem platforms.

Qualifications

• Experience leading enterprise-scale observability initiatives.
• Strong hands-on expertise with Grafana, Grafana Cloud, and OpenTelemetry.
• Deep understanding of metrics, logs, traces, SLIs and SLOs.
• Experience across cloud, on-premises and hybrid platforms.

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

Skills

Leadership

Grafana experience

OpenTelemetry

Observability concepts

Azure Monitor expertise

Tools

Grafana

Grafana Cloud

OpenTelemetry

Azure Monitor

Log Analytics

Application Insights

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 of the Lead Observability Engineer/SRE Lead will be to:

• 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

The successful Lead Observability Engineer/SRE Lead will demonstrate the following:

• 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