Observability Architect

Jobtailor; Bristol; On-site; GBP 75,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Jobtailor in Bristol seeks an experienced Observability Architect to lead the design and optimisation of the co-location migration observability strategy. You will review current architecture across infrastructure, networks, middleware, databases and applications to ensure readiness and long-term operational support.

You will define metrics, logging, and tracing standards, develop real-time dashboards, establish health indicators, and implement intelligent alerting aligned to critical journeys.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing enterprise observability solutions for large-scale migrations.
• Strong knowledge of metrics, logging, tracing, and APM.
• Experience monitoring latency-sensitive enterprise apps.
• Understanding of infra, virtualization, networks, storage, databases, and middleware monitoring.
• Experience implementing centralized logging and observability best practices.
• Familiarity with financial services regulatory requirements.
• Analytical mindset with strong stakeholder communication.

Responsibilities

• Lead the assessment, design, and optimisation of the observability strategy for the migration programme.
• Review current observability across infrastructure, networks, middleware, databases and apps.
• Assess logging, metrics, tracing and monitoring capabilities for migration readiness.
• Develop an observability strategy for migration and ongoing operations.
• Recommend tooling enhancements or platform uplifts for visibility and resilience.
• Analyse telemetry and dashboards from completed migration waves.
• Establish performance baselines for compute, storage, networking and app response times.
• Identify recurring issues and use insights to improve migration readiness.
• Define measurable service health indicators to compare pre/post-migration.
• Design monitoring for monolithic estate focusing on latency-sensitive interdependencies.
• Create real-time dashboards across infrastructure, middleware, databases, messaging and apps.
• Ensure end-to-end transaction tracing to identify bottlenecks quickly.
• Validate monitoring coverage before each migration wave.
• Review and standardise centralised logging across migrated environments.
• Ensure consistent log formats, metadata, correlation IDs and traceability.
• Validate log ingestion, retention, indexing and search performance.
• Enable ops teams to investigate incidents with correlated logs and traces.
• Review and optimise alert thresholds to minimise misses and noise.
• Implement intelligent alerting aligned to business services and journeys.
• Define migration-specific alerting for infra failures and capacity constraints.
• Support readiness activities including rehearsals and production cutovers.
• Ensure observability meets financial-regulatory audit requirements.
• Validate access controls and security monitoring for observability platforms.
• Support governance, audit and regulatory reviews with evidence gathering.
• Evaluate existing platforms and recommend improvements where needed.
• Assess opportunities to improve automation and predictive alerting.
• Define standards and best practices for observability across future migrations.
• Collaborate with Architects, Platform, Security, Operations and Migration teams.
• Provide technical guidance during migration planning and cutovers.
• Produce architecture docs, monitoring standards and runbooks.

Skills

Observability design

Performance monitoring

Distributed tracing

Logging & metrics

Stakeholder management

Regulatory compliance

Tools

ELK stack

Prometheus

Grafana

SRE tooling

Job description

Job Responsibilities

• Lead the assessment, design, and optimisation of the observability strategy for the co-location migration programme.
• Review the current observability architecture across infrastructure, networks, middleware, databases, and applications.
• Assess existing logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and monitoring capabilities to determine readiness for the co-location migration.
• Develop an observability strategy that supports both migration activities and long-term operational support.
• Recommend enhancements or platform uplifts where current tooling does not provide sufficient visibility or resilience.
• Analyse telemetry, monitoring data, dashboards, and operational trends from completed migration waves.
• Establish performance baselines for compute, storage, networking, application response times, and transaction throughput.
• Identify recurring operational issues and use historical insights to improve migration readiness.
• Define measurable service health indicators to compare pre- and post-migration performance.
• Design comprehensive monitoring for the tightly-coupled monolithic application estate, with particular emphasis on latency-sensitive interdependencies.
• Create real-time dashboards that provide operational visibility across infrastructure, middleware, databases, messaging, and application components.
• Ensure end-to-end transaction tracing is available to rapidly identify bottlenecks and service degradation.
• Validate monitoring coverage prior to each migration wave.
• Review and standardise centralised logging across all migrated environments.
• Ensure consistent log formats, metadata, correlation IDs, and traceability across systems.
• Validate log ingestion, retention policies, indexing, and search performance.
• Ensure operational teams can rapidly investigate incidents using correlated logs and distributed traces.
• Review and optimise alert thresholds to minimise both missed events and unnecessary alert noise.
• Implement intelligent alerting aligned to business services and critical customer journeys.
• Define migration-specific alerting for infrastructure failures, application degradation, latency increases, replication issues, and capacity constraints.
• Support operational readiness activities including rehearsals and production cutover monitoring.
• Ensure observability solutions meet financial services regulatory requirements for auditability, log retention, security, and data governance.
• Validate access controls and security monitoring for observability platforms.
• Support evidence gathering for internal governance, audit, and regulatory reviews.
• Evaluate the suitability of existing observability platforms and recommend improvements where required.
• Assess opportunities to improve automation, anomaly detection, service health monitoring, and predictive alerting.
• Define standards and best practices for observability across future migration phases.
• Work closely with Infrastructure Architects, Application Architects, Platform Engineering, Security, Operations, and Migration teams.
• Provide technical guidance during migration planning, testing, dress rehearsals, and production cutovers.
• Produce architecture documentation, monitoring standards, operational runbooks, and knowledge transfer materials.

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing enterprise observability solutions within large-scale infrastructure or data centre migration programmes.
• Strong knowledge of metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and application performance monitoring (APM).
• Experience monitoring latency-sensitive, business-critical enterprise applications.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure, virtualisation, networking, storage, databases, and middleware monitoring.
• Experience implementing centralised logging and observability best practices.
• Knowledge of financial services operational resilience, audit, and regulatory requirements.
• Ability to analyse complex operational telemetry and identify performance bottlenecks.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.