Lead Observability Engineer

Working style: Hybrid 50% home/office based

As a Lead Observability Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in shaping, evolving, and ope rationalising the observability ecosystem across Royal London. You will provide technical leadership, architectural direction, and hands‑on engineering expertise to ensure our services remain reliable, performant, measurable, and transparent.

You will lead the engineering roadmap for our observability platforms while guiding the transition toward more open, scalable, vendor‑agnostic approaches and modern event‑streaming technologies.

This role sits within the Operational Tooling team, a key capability that provides enterprise‑wide insights, telemetry pipelines, monitoring platforms, and tooling governance for production services.

• Lead the end‑to‑end architecture for observability across applications, APIs, cloud infrastructure, on‑prem infrastructure, networks, databases, integration platforms, and iPaaS/streaming workloads (including Kafka/Confluent).
• Define and embed best practices for logs, metrics, traces, events, dashboards, synthetic monitoring, and distributed tracing across platform and delivery teams.
• Provide deep technical expertise to guide platform direction, capability uplift, and onboarding new services.
• Ensure observability tooling is resilient, scalable, and optimised for cost, performance, and operational usage.
• Lead the event handing and correlation framework within Royal London.
• Support complex major incident investigations.
• Mentor engineers in Operational Tooling and wider technology communities, sharing knowledge on reliability, monitoring patterns, and instrumentation.
• Work closely with Infrastructure Services, Platform Engineering, Application Engineering, Security, and Architecture teams to drive coherent observability practices.
• Contribute to roadmaps, engineering standards, decision records, and community‑of‑practice forums.
• Champion automation, scripting (Power Shell/Python), and self‑service enablement for teams across Royal London.

• Strong hands‑on experience with enterprise observability platforms:
  Splunk, App Dynamics, Logic Monitor, Azure Monitor/App Insights, Grafana, or similar.
• Deep understanding of logs, metrics, traces, events, distributed tracing, APM, and service health modelling.
• Experience designing telemetry pipelines, automated instrumentation, and data ingestion patterns.
• Knowledge of Open Telemetry integrations.
• Familiarity with Azure cloud services and monitoring integrations.
• Ability to lead complex technical discovery, architecture, and decision‑making.
• Strong documentation habits—able to create clear diagrams, guides, runbooks, and monitoring standards.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence cross‑functional teams.
• Experience coaching engineers, promoting best practices, and driving continuous improvement.

We’re an Inclusive employer. We celebrate and value different backgrounds and cultures across Royal London. Our diverse people and perspectives give us a range of skills which are recognised and respected – whatever their background.