Senior Engineer, Security & Observability Platform

DESCRIPTION:

We're hiring a Senior Engineer to own the end-to-end evaluation, design, and implementation of security and observability solutions for a container-based infrastructure platform. If you love architecting systems, evaluating tools for production readiness, and building security-first monitoring at scale, this role is for you.

You'll be the technical owner of the platform's observability and security monitoring stack, working across platform engineering, security operations, and SRE teams. This is a high-ownership role spanning architectural research, proof-of-concept work, production deployment, and ongoing operations.

This is a fixed-term contract role, 12 months engagement.

What You'll Do

Evaluation & Research

• Conduct structured evaluation of candidate tools against criteria including license compliance, community governance, vendor independence, and technical fitness
• Perform proof-of-concept exercises to validate architectural decisions (ingestion throughput, storage efficiency, query latency, operational complexity)
• Assess and track governance posture of selected tools; maintain contingency paths for vendor-led dependencies
• Engage with upstream open-source communities to stay current on project maturity and roadmap changes

Design & Architecture

• Design unified telemetry pipelines using open standards to serve both SRE observability and security operations
• Architect security detection workflows using vendor-neutral detection languages to ensure portability across backends
• Design vulnerability aggregation and management workflows spanning container scanning, SCA, static analysis, infrastructure scanning, and SBOM generation
• Design supply chain security controls including image signing, provenance attestation, and registry policy enforcement
• Design exposure path analysis using graph-based tooling to map relationships across compute orchestration, identity, and vulnerability data
• Design automated remediation and orchestration workflows integrated with alerting and incident management
• Produce and maintain architecture decision records documenting rationale, trade-offs, and change history

Implementation & Operations

• Deploy and operate observability stack: telemetry collection, analytical storage, dashboarding, metrics scraping, alerting, and log routing
• Deploy and operate security monitoring stack: detection, vulnerability aggregation, and infrastructure scanning
• Deploy and operate CI pipeline security: image scanning, dependency scanning, SBOM generation, static analysis, IaC scanning, and secrets detection
• Implement container registry security with integrated scanning and admission policy enforcement
• Implement identity, secrets management, and certificate lifecycle infrastructure
• Implement collaboration and incident management tooling
• Build and maintain detection rules, alerting rules, and automation playbooks
• Operate all components on container orchestration platforms with fleet-wide deployment tooling

Process & Governance

• Define and document operational runbooks for each capability area
• Establish and maintain vendor-independence contingency entries for all vendor-led tools
• Conduct periodic license and governance re-assessment of selected tools
• Define SLOs for telemetry pipeline availability, ingestion latency, and detection coverage
• Participate in security incident response using the tooling you build

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years in platform engineering, SRE, or security engineering roles

• Strong hands-on experience with at least 3 of the following:

  • Telemetry collection frameworks and instrumentation standards
  • Columnar or analytical databases for log/trace/event storage
  • Metrics scraping and alerting ecosystems
  • SIEM operations and detection engineering (vendor-neutral detection rule formats preferred)
  • Search-based log analytics platforms

• Production experience deploying and operating on Kubernetes or equivalent container orchestration

• Experience with container security scanning and software composition analysis tooling

• Familiarity with supply chain security concepts: SBOM, image signing, provenance attestation, admission control

• Experience with at least one SOAR or automation/orchestration platform

• Solid understanding of log collection and routing architectures

• Experience writing detection rules or correlation logic for security monitoring

• Ability to evaluate open-source projects for governance health, license risk, and production readiness

• Strong Linux systems fundamentals

Bonus

• Experience with host-based intrusion detection or endpoint detection and response tooling
• Experience with graph databases and asset/infrastructure relationship mapping
• Familiarity with vulnerability management and aggregation platforms
• Experience with identity providers, directory services, and secrets management
• Contributions to open-source security or observability projects
• Experience operating in regulated environments with strict vendor-independence requirements
• Familiarity with enterprise Linux and container platform ecosystems
• Experience with GitOps workflows for infrastructure services
• Static/dynamic application security testing tooling experience

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience
• Relevant certifications a plus (Kubernetes security, Linux administration, offensive security, cloud security specializations)