Sr. Observability Engineer in London

Music is Universal. It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does. Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation. We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles.

Job Summary: We are UMG, the Universal Music Group. We are the world’s leading music company. In everything we do, we are committed to artistry, innovation and entrepreneurship. We own and operate a broad array of businesses engaged in recorded music, music publishing, merchandising, and audiovisual content in more than 60 countries. We identify and develop recording artists and songwriters, and we produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to delight and entertain fans around the world.

As a Senior Observability Engineer, you will be a driving force for technical excellence and strategic vision within our global team. You will be instrumental in architecting, building, and leading our comprehensive observability strategy to ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of our critical IT systems. This senior role demands a passion for data-driven strategy, a commitment to automation, and the ability to mentor and lead. You will not only solve complex technical challenges but also influence the direction of observability practices across UMG globally, ensuring our technology landscape is as world-class as our music.

Job Functions:

• Architecture & Strategy: Lead the architectural design and strategic roadmap for our observability stack. Drive the vision for world-class monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting solutions across our hybrid and cloud-native environments.
• Innovate & Automate: Spearhead the evaluation, selection, and implementation of cutting-edge observability tools and platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana). Architect and build robust, automated observability pipelines. Take an active part in documenting and defining processes and best practice.
• Optimize & Analyze: Conduct deep-dive analysis of telemetry data to proactively identify performance bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization, and guide capacity planning.
• Lead & Mentor: Act as a technical leader and mentor for the observability team and wider engineering groups. Champion and enforce best practices, fostering a culture of proactive and data-informed decision-making.
• Drive Incident & Problem Management: Work with Operations teams on high-priority incident resolution efforts, utilizing deep analysis of telemetry data for swift root cause identification. Drive post-incident reviews and implement long-term solutions to enhance system resilience.
• Collaborate & Influence: Partner with Development, SRE, and Infrastructure leaders to embed observability into the entire technology lifecycle. Influence and drive the adoption of observability best practices across the global organization.
• Make UMG the place to be: Mentor, manage and genuinely lead the Observability team in a way that attracts and retains the best talent. UMG is a place where everyone can bring themselves fully to work and thrive; as a Leader, you are a key part of this.

Job Requirements:

• Essential Qualifications:
• Experience: 5-7+ years of hands-on experience in an Observability, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or DevOps role, with a proven track record of leading complex projects.
• Technical Leadership: Demonstrated experience in architecting and designing large-scale monitoring and observability solutions.
• Expert-Level Tooling: Deep expertise with modern observability platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, AWS Cloudwatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, OpenTelemetry).
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Advanced knowledge of major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Programming & Automation: Strong programming and scripting skills (e.g., Python, Go, Shell) with a focus on creating scalable automation and custom tooling.
• Problem-Solving: Exceptional analytical and strategic problem-solving skills, with the ability to lead through complex technical challenges.
• Data Analysis: Expertise in analysing and visualising telemetry data into meaningful information to drive actions.
• Hands-on: Demonstratable hands-on engineering and coding experience, ability to deep-dive into existing and emerging technologies to identify opportunities and solutions.
• Containerization and Orchestration: Understanding of container technologies (e.g., Docker) and container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes) to monitor and manage containerized applications.
• Networking Knowledge: Understanding of networking principles and protocols to effectively monitor and troubleshoot network-related issues.
• Security Awareness: Awareness of security best practices and the ability to integrate security monitoring into observability processes.
• Communication & Influence: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, capable of articulating a technical vision to diverse audiences and influencing senior stakeholders. Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams, convey findings, and discuss improvements with developers and operations teams.
• Continuous Learning: Given the dynamic nature of technology, a commitment to continuous learning and staying updated on the latest trends in observability and monitoring. Self-motivated with a high degree of initiative and excellent follow-up skills, along with strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Travel may be required but is not part of the regular work schedule.
• Bachelor’s degree in technology related field as well as 5+ years of relevant experience within the Observability field.

Desired Qualifications:

• Advanced Concepts: Proven experience with Chaos Engineering, AI-driven analytics, defining SLOs/SLIs, and advanced deployment strategies (Canary/Blue-Green).
• Software Engineering Foundation: Strong background in software engineering principles, database administration, and distributed systems architecture.
• Certifications: Relevant senior-level industry certifications (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional, Certified Kubernetes Administrator).

Just So You Know... The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder’s specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.