Senior DevOps / ELK Engineer

A senior Elasticsearch & Observability Engineer role focuses on designing, building, maintaining, and extending the Elastic Stack to drive observability practices across complex environments (Mainframe, Open Systems, and Container platforms). Day-to-day work combines technical execution, platform optimization, cross-team collaboration, continuous delivery governance, and coaching to drive observability adoption.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, maintain, support, and extend the Elastic Stack (Beats, Elastic Agents, Logstash, Elasticsearch, Kibana);
• Drive Observability practices and design solutions for applications hosted on Mainframe, Open Systems, and Container platforms;
• Ensure platform performance, indexing efficiency, log retention policies, data lifecycle management, and secure access control;
• Follow vendor updates, new feature releases, and market trends to continuously evolve the observability platform;
• Work closely with development teams, architects, and operations teams to ensure the seamless integration of observability and CI/CD knowledge;
• Establish best practices and governance for application monitoring, and compliance with coding standards/guidelines;
• Coach and mentor team members, driving the adoption of new observability solutions across the organization;
• Collaborate with stakeholders to analyze needs, estimate effort for new features, co-create value-driven roadmaps, and report progress to Product Owners/Management;
• Lead production troubleshooting, root cause analysis (RCA), incident handling (P1/P2), and release execution.

What You'll Need

• University degree in Computer Science, Engineering or comparable technical field;
• 5-10 years of hands-on experience in IT environments with focus on observability and production support;
• Proven track record in Agile delivery models and incident/release management;
• Solid experience in cross-team coordination, stakeholder communication, and effort estimation;
• OS & Infrastructure knowledge: Linux and Windows fundamentals (processes, file systems, shell, key metrics); Mainframe knowledge is a plus.

Technical Skills

• Strong hands-on expertise with Elastic platform (Beats, Elastic Agents, Logstash, Elasticsearch, Kibana, OpenTelemetry standards);
• Observability core concepts: logs, metrics, traces, golden signals, log analysis, dashboard creation, and alerting configuration;
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD tools (Bitbucket, Git, Jenkins, UCD, Ansible) and automated testing frameworks;
• Container & Cloud technologies: Docker & Kubernetes; APIs and system integration (REST API fundamentals);
• Basic understanding of security controls: authentication, RBAC, access management, and audit compliance;
• Elasticsearch certification and Microsoft Azure knowledge are a strong plus;
• Productivity Tools: Jira, Confluence, ServiceNow, MS Office.

Profile & Other Requirements

• Professional English C1 (spoken and written) — mandatory; French and/or Dutch is a plus;
• Strong collaboration & coaching skills — comfortable mentoring peers and interacting with technical and non-technical stakeholders;
• Proactive mindset with strong ownership, structured problem-solving, and continuous learning attitude;
• Experience in regulated environments (e.g., Financial Services) is a strong plus;
• Willingness and availability for on-call support and scheduled overtime activities when required;
• Must own a valid work permit or EU/Schengen Space nationality to legally work in Portugal;
• Portugal-based, specifically in Lisbon — hybrid working model (CET alignment required): 2x per week on-site in Oriente station.

Legal: Must own a valid work permit or EU/Schengen Space Nationality to legally work in Portugal.