Observability Lead, Wealth

NatWest Group; London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial services company is seeking an Observability Lead to enhance monitoring capabilities within the Wealth Chief Digital Information Office. This role involves driving a strategic observability strategy and leading a high-performing team. Candidates should have leadership experience in IT observability with expertise in monitoring tools like Datadog and Dynatrace, along with strong skills in stakeholder management and decision making.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership in IT observability within financial services.
• Deep expertise in monitoring tools.
• Experience with embedding observability into ITIL-aligned frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the WCDIO IT observability strategy.
• Establish governance frameworks for observability.
• Lead the strategy for the observability platform CheckMK.

Skills

Leadership in IT observability

Data-driven decision making

Excellent communication skills

Strong stakeholder management

Tools

Datadog

Dynatrace

AppDynamics

Broadcom DX APM

Job description

Join us as an Observability Lead, Wealth

• We are seeking a visionary and technically astute Observability Lead to drive the strategic transformation of our monitoring capabilities within the Wealth Chief Digital Information Office (WCDIO)
• This role will help to define and execute a firm-wide observability strategy, enhance visibility into mobile and application performance, and drive proactive insights into customer journeys.
• If you’re ready for a new challenge, and want to make a far-reaching impact through your work, this could be the position that you’ve been looking for as you lead a high-performing team responsible for the observability platform and embed client-centric metrics into operational processes
• You'll work from home some of the time but you will be required to spend at least 2 days a month in our London office

What you’ll do

Day-to-day, define and own the WCDIO IT observability strategy aligned with business outcomes and client experience goals and champion a shift from reactive monitoring to proactive observability, with emphasis on key customer journeys and digital touchpoints.

Alongside this, you’ll establish governance frameworks for observability, including error budgets, service-level objectives (SLOs), and client impact scoring and encourage the adoption of open telemetry.

Your top priorities will include:

• Leading the strategy for the current observability platform CheckMK, ensuring scalability, resilience, and integration across systems, alongside overseeing platform architecture, CI/CD integration, tagging strategy, and automated alerting logic
• Driving vendor evaluation and selection for APM, mobile monitoring, and user experience analytics
• Developing and implementing strategies to enhance monitoring coverage across mobile apps, APIs, and end-to-end user journeys
• Collaborating with application teams to embed instrumentation and telemetry into new and existing services and integrating observability data with incident management, CMDB, and client satisfaction metrics such as NPS and opportunity cost overlays
• Defining and implementing a structure for error budgets, linking them to escalation paths and client tiering
• Partnering with Risk and Service Management to align observability insights with impact and urgency matrices
• Driving continuous improvement through root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics

The skills you’ll need

To be successful in this role, you’ll need proven leadership in IT observability, monitoring, or APM within financial services or regulated industries, along with deep expertise in tools such as Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or Broadcom DX APM You’ll also need a strong understanding of mobile telemetry, synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), and distributed tracing.

In addition, you’ll have experience of embedding observability into ITIL-aligned incident and problem management frameworks and familiarity with ServiceNow CMDB integration and CI tagging strategies .

Furthermore, you’ll need:

• To be a data-driven decision maker with fluency in dashboards, scoring models, and operational KPIs
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with ability to mentor and grow a high-performing team
• Strong stakeholder management across Technology, Risk, Operations, and Client Experience teams
• To be a strategic thinker with a client-first mindset and ability to translate technical insights into business impact