Lead Data Engineer (ELK / Observability)

SWIFT; Kuala Lumpur; On-site; MYR 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

A global financial messaging leader is seeking a highly experienced Lead Engineer based in Kuala Lumpur. This role involves co-leading the ELK platform while owning the CI/CD pipeline lifecycle. The candidate must have over 12 years of experience in software development and a solid background in DevOps engineering. The position entails collaborating with cross-functional teams to enhance observability and monitoring capabilities, ensuring the delivery of high-quality software at scale.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Career development opportunities

Diverse and inclusive environment

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software development including DevOps engineering.
• Experience with ELK stack at scale.
• Knowledge of observability concepts.

Responsibilities

• Co-lead the ELK platform initiatives.
• Own CI/CD pipelines end-to-end.
• Mentor engineers and lead design reviews.

Skills

Software development

DevOps engineering

Leadership

Collaborative skills

Agile methodology

Education

University degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

Elasticsearch

Logstash

Kibana

Ansible

Docker

Job description

ABOUT US

We’re the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services, headquartered in Belgium. We are the way the world moves value – across borders, through cities and overseas. No other organisation can address the scale, precision, pace and trust that this demands, and we’re proud to support the global economy.

We’re unique too. We were established to find a better way for the global financial community to move value – a reliable, safe and secure approach that the community can trust, completely. We’re always striving to be better and are constantly evolving in an ever-changing landscape, without undermining that trust. Five decades on, our vibrant community reflects the complexity and diversity of the financial ecosystem. We innovate diligently, test exhaustively, then implement fast. In a connected and exciting era, our mission has never been more relevant. Swift now has a presence in 200+ countries and legal territories to serve a community of more than 12,000 banks and financial institutions.

As we continue to elevate our Observability Platform and Practice, we are seeking a highly experienced and motivated Lead Engineer to play a central role in advancing the software development process. This is a key position responsible for designing, implementing, and continually enhancing our Observability and Monitoring capabilities to ensure the systems are in a scalable state and adhering to global standards. You will be at the forefront of shaping the vision for CI/CD within the organization, overseeing everything from development, release and deployment lifecycle. In this role, you will take ownership of developing automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline along with Release Orchestration. Your contributions will ensure that we deliver high-quality, reliable software at speed while maintaining performance at scale.

Key Responsibilities

Co-lead the ELK platform

• Architect, deploy, and scale Elasticsearch clusters (hot-warm-cold tiers, ILM, snapshot/restore).
• Design ingestion with Logstash/Beats/Elastic Agent; standardize parsing (grok processors), mappings, and templates.
• Implement APM/tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry) and align logs/metrics/traces for end-to-end visibility.
• Build dashboards (Kibana) and analyst-friendly views; automate alerting and anomaly detection.
• Govern access (RBAC), encryption, masking; manage capacity & cost efficiency (index strategies, routing).

DevOps excellence: CI/CD & Release Orchestration

• Own CI/CD pipelines end-to-end (build, test, package, scan, deploy, rollback).
• Create pipelines for infra and content (Ansible for infra; version dashboards, index templates, alert rules).
• Good understanding of GIT branching strategy relation with CI/CD.
• Implement automated release/deployment orchestration.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Mentor engineers; lead technical design reviews and roadmap planning.
• Collaborate with Security/Compliance for security, auditability and data governance.
• Advocate observability standards across engineering (structured logging, trace context propagation).

What will make you successful?

• 12+ years in software development including data/platform/DevOps engineering; 3+ with ELK at scale (hot-warm-cold, ILM, index templates).
• University degree in Computer Science, software engineering or equivalent.
• Experience with data ingestion with big data technologies (either Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana, Kafka or any other message queue system).
• Experience of Elasticsearch internals (shards/replicas, ILM, index patterns, snapshots, query tuning).
• Knowledge on observability concepts (APM, traces, metrics, logs), alerting strategies, and on-call operations.
• Experience in one of the programming languages (Java or Python) and have good understanding of OOP.
• Experience in Relational Database (e.g. Oracle, MySQL) or NoSQL Databases.
• Experience with DevOps CI/CD tools (Cloudbees / Jenkins / Openshift / Ansible / Docker).
• Knowledge on DevOps principal model including support and maintenance on product delivery Kibana, Kafka and etc.
• Exposure to various OS platforms such as Window, Linux.
• Practical working experience in an Agile driven team.
• Strong interpersonal skills, customer centric attitude, ability to deal with cultural diversity.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with local and remote teams in different time zones.
• Able to build strong partnerships with internal customers and other delivery organizations inside Swift.

Additional Experience

• Experience in API benchmarking with tools such as JMeter, Postman is a plus.
• Experience with SOA technologies such as micro-services, REST, SOAP is essential.

What we offer

• We put you in control of career.
• We give you a competitive package.
• We help you perform at your best.
• We help you make a difference.
• We give you the freedom to be yourself.

We give you the freedom to be yourself. We are creating an environment of unique individuals – like you – with different perspectives on the financial industry and the world. A diverse and inclusive environment in which everyone’s voice counts and where you can reach your full potential.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, please contact us to request accommodation.

Don’t meet every single requirement? At Swift, we are dedicated to building a workplace where people can bring their full selves and ideas to the team, so if you are excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every single qualification.