Observability Lead

Observability Lead – Contract

Overview

We are looking for an experienced Observability Lead to support a complex technology estate and help shape the organisation’s observability capability.

This is a hands-on and strategic role requiring someone with strong technical credibility alongside excellent stakeholder-management skills . You will work closely with platform leads, architects, senior engineers, suppliers and other technical stakeholders, operating confidently at both a strategic and technical level.

The initial focus will be on understanding the current observability landscape, improving visibility across critical services and delivering practical outcomes quickly. Alongside this, you will help define the longer-term observability strategy, architecture and roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Assess a complex hybrid technology estate across cloud, on-premises, legacy and third-party platforms.
• Identify and document existing telemetry sources, monitoring tools, dashboards, alerting and ownership.
• Work with technical teams and suppliers to understand current capabilities, constraints and access requirements.
• Develop meaningful dashboards, service-health views and operational visualisations.
• Identify and address gaps in telemetry, monitoring and alerting coverage.
• Define appropriate health indicators for critical customer and business journeys.
• Develop a roadmap for OpenTelemetry adoption.
• Assess options for a centralised telemetry platform and evaluate different technology approaches.
• Assess opportunities for tooling rationalisation, operating-cost optimisation and telemetry economics.
• Define an observability target architecture, standards and implementation roadmap.
• Introduce modern observability practices, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets and burn-rate alerting , where appropriate.
• Influence platform leads, architects, senior engineers and suppliers to drive adoption and delivery.

Skills & Experience

• 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 budgets .
• Experience across cloud PaaS, IaaS, on-premises, legacy and third-party hosted environments .
• Strong knowledge of Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and Application Insights .
• Experience assessing telemetry storage, retention and cost-management strategies.
• Strong understanding of observability architecture and telemetry pipelines.
• Proven ability to engage and influence platform leads, architects and senior engineers at both technical and strategic levels.
• Experience working across complex multi-supplier environments .
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills.

The Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate will combine deep technical observability expertise with strong stakeholder-management and leadership capability .

You will be comfortable getting into the technical detail when required, while also being able to engage senior technical stakeholders on strategy, architecture, investment and transformation.

The role requires someone who can balance immediate operational improvements with a longer-term observability transformation , bringing structure to a complex environment and driving progress across multiple teams.

Key Technologies

Grafana | Grafana Cloud | OpenTelemetry | Azure Monitor | Log Analytics | Application Insights | Metrics | Logs | Traces | Distributed Tracing | SLIs | SLOs | Error Budgets | Burn-Rate Alerting