Staff Engineer (Engineering Observability)

This position is posted by Jobgether on behalf of a partner company. We are currently looking for a Staff Engineer (Engineering Observability) in Australia.

This role sits at the heart of a large-scale engineering organisation, responsible for defining and evolving how system health, performance, and reliability are understood across complex distributed environments. You will lead the design of observability platforms that unify metrics, logs, traces, and alerting into a cohesive ecosystem that empowers engineering teams to act quickly and confidently. The role combines deep technical architecture with strategic influence, ensuring observability is embedded as a default capability across the software lifecycle. You will partner with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to translate reliability challenges into scalable, practical solutions. This is a high-impact position where your work directly improves system resilience, developer experience, and operational efficiency. You will also shape standards, tooling, and practices that enable teams to build and operate highly observable systems at scale.

• Define and drive the organisation’s observability strategy, aligning technical initiatives with key customer journeys and measurable reliability outcomes.
• Design and evolve end-to-end observability architectures, including telemetry pipelines, instrumentation frameworks, and OpenTelemetry-based solutions.
• Establish and enforce best practices for metrics, logs, traces, tagging, alerting, and incident response across engineering teams.
• Develop SLI/SLO frameworks to improve service reliability, visibility, and operational decision-making.
• Build scalable “paved roads,” reusable patterns, and tooling to simplify adoption of observability practices.
• Partner with engineering, product, and platform teams to integrate observability into the full software development lifecycle.
• Improve signal quality, alerting systems, and incident response workflows to accelerate detection and resolution of issues.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship, influencing engineering practices across multiple teams without formal authority.

Requirements:

• Extensive experience in observability engineering, platform engineering, or similar infrastructure-focused roles in large-scale environments.
• Strong expertise in SLIs/SLOs, telemetry design, distributed systems observability, and reliability engineering principles.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing observability pipelines using tools such as OpenTelemetry and modern telemetry stacks.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog (or equivalent tools).
• Proven ability to design scalable architectures for logs, metrics, traces, and event-driven monitoring systems.
• Strong influence and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to drive alignment across multiple engineering teams.
• Passion for building engineering standards, frameworks, and reusable solutions that improve developer productivity.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to translate complex technical challenges into clear, actionable guidance.

Benefits:

• Annual performance bonus scheme.
• Flexible working arrangements, including hybrid work and work-from-home options.
• Additional leave options including flexi days, volunteer days, and purchased leave.
• Generous parental leave policies supporting primary carers and partners.
• Opportunity to work remotely from anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year.
• Inclusive and high-performance culture focused on wellbeing and diversity.
• Strong emphasis on learning, collaboration, and engineering excellence.
• Modern, collaborative workplace environment with strong social and team culture.