Observability Engineer (SRE)

Overview

Home. There's no place like it.

And there's no feeling like helping people create the joy of feeling truly at home. At Dunelm, that's what we do. We're the UK's number one choice for homewares because we make home life lovelier for our customers. And we've crafted a workplace that feels just as welcoming – where you can bring your ideas, be yourself, and feel right at home.

Work your way, together.

We're a hybrid business, which means you'll have flexibility alongside time together with your team. In this role, you can expect at least two days per month in our London office, helping you stay connected, collaborate, and do your best work for our customers. Note that there may be an expectation of other ad-hoc office days where necessary.

Role Summary

We're looking for an Observability Engineer, to help continue to drive service health across our entire technology stack. Your work will directly impact reliability, performance, and customer experience.

The Team

Our SRE team is a high-trust, high-impact group of engineers who bring software engineering principles to operational reliability.

We are hands-on developers and systems thinkers who build scalable, observable, and resilient platforms. Working closely with other Engineering, Data, and Platform & Operations (PlatOps) teams, we help them build reliable, cost-efficiency, and easy-to-diagnose systems and services. We also help the Site Operations Engineering (SOE) team lead incident response, improve deployment safety, and guide teams towards a sustainable model of service ownership.

We collect, process, and export large volumes of telemetry data every day and are constantly evolving our approach to cost-efficiency. Observability is a first-class concern that shapes how we build and support services across the business.

Message From the Principal Engineer:

"Hi! I'm Dan, the Principal Site Reliability Engineer here at Dunelm. The SRE team has evolved quite a bit since I started three years ago. We have moved from an engineer-per-team 'embedded' engagement model to a combination 'tools & consulting' model. This has allowed us to scale our coverage more effectively and deliver more meaningful impact throughout Dunelm's service teams. The other big change has been moving from proprietary instrumentation to OpenTelemetry, giving us better flexibility, consistency, and control of the telemetry that we ingest, process, and export. I'm looking forward to receiving your application and hopefully welcoming you into our team."

Interview Process

1. Introductory video call (around 45 minutes) with the Principal Engineer and Product Delivery Lead to get to know each other, explain the role, and hear about your experience, goals, and approach to work.
2. Technical Discussion (90 minutes) with a few members of the SRE team. You will work through scenario-based questions designed to help you to highlight your knowledge, specific approaches and where you feel any improvements could be made.

Important note: we understand the pressure people are under now in applying for multiple jobs and our straightforward two-stage process, without a practical aspect, is hopefully a refreshing change. However, please read this job description carefully.

What you'll be doing

1. Engineering & Automation

Build automation and reliability tooling using well-architected, maintainable, testable, and easy to read & understand code. Contribute to shared libraries, observability components, and internal platforms.

2. Observability Instrumentation

Help evolve our observability strategy across systems and services. Drive how we collect, process, sample, and surface logs, distributed traces and metrics using OpenTelemetry. Focus on high-quality telemetry that enables fast diagnosis, cost efficiency, and meaningful visibility across the stack.

3. Service Levels & Ownership

Help teams truly own their services by helping to define and adopt meaningful SLIs and SLOs. Guide product teams in using observability data to make reliability measurable.

4. Incident Response

Participate in on-call investigations when issues arise. Drive blameless post-incident reviews and help to identify observability gaps, recommend mitigating actions that stem losses, but also permanent fixes that prevent recurrence.

5. Infrastructure & Pipelines

Model infrastructure using tools such as Pulumi, CDK, and Terraform in AWS and other PaaS and SaaS providers. Improve pipelines and support safe deployment strategies (e.g. canary, blue & green).

6. Mentoring & Team Growth

Help support and coach other engineers. Participate in technical discussions and share knowledge through pairing, planning, and documentation.

7. Continuous Learning and Innovation

Stay ahead of emerging practices in observability. Lead team proof-of-concepts and introduce new patterns or tools that improve our platform.

8. Strategic Development

Contribute to the prioritisation of the SRE roadmap. Help shape observability tooling, telemetry patterns, and platform-wide approaches to service ownership and reliability.

9. Aligning to Business Goals

Use observability insights to support product goals. Help to ensure SRE priorities align with Dunelm's wider objectives for quality, performance, and customer experience.

What we'll look for in you

Essential Skills

Software Engineering: Languages

Most of our services are in TypeScript, Rust, and Python, so knowledge of at least one of these is required. However, deep knowledge of specific programming languages is not as important as understanding what the code is doing (or understanding what AI tells you the code is doing).

Software Engineering: Principles

We value idiomatic, pragmatic, and testable code with strong, appropriate automated testing. How that code is produced (using AI and / or manually) is not as important as you being able to explain (and potentially defend it) in a code review.

Architecture

Most of our services run on AWS and are serverless (Lambda) or containerised (ECS & Fargate), so specific knowledge of deploying and running software in those environments, plus general networking principles, is required.

OpenTelemetry

We are moving towards as much OpenTelemetry as possible throughout the entirety of our technology stack, so OpenTelemetry knowledge is a must. Specifically, you need to know about the tools, SDKs, specifications etc.

Observability Back-Ends

The ability to confidently use and configure observability back-end platforms is crucial for this role. Again, use of a specific platform is not as important as understanding how to interrogate telemetry to gain an understanding of systems and services or determining suitable alert rules.

Infrastructure-as-Code

The team mostly use Pulumi in TypeScript to define our architecture, but if you've only ever used Terraform or CDK, that's great – if you apply the same software engineering principles above.

Mindset

You will need to have a problem-solving and investigative mindset and be someone for whom attention to detail is extremely important.

Desirable Skills

Advanced OpenTelemetry

If you have previous experience helping to instrument, deploy, and run OpenTelemetry at scale in a production environment, please put that front-and-centre on your application.

Incident Response

Experience participating in an on-call rotation and being part of incident investigation, root cause / contributing factors analysis and blameless post-incident reviews would be beneficial.

Cost Optimisation

From head and tail sampling to metric cardinality to good old not generating unnecessary telemetry in the first place, we're very interested in someone who can help us tackle the trickiest observability and cloud cost problems. Let us know if you're that person!

Retail Sector

If you're fully clued-up on the observability challenges a multi-channel UK-based retailed is facing and is expected to face, you've got a head start on other candidates, so make sure this is clear in your application.

If you are not a 100% fit (but very close) to having the essential skills and experience, we would encourage you to still apply for this position.

Behaviours & Values

At Dunelm, our shared values of Act Like Owners, Keep Listening & Learning, Long-Term Thinking, and Stronger Together serve as the foundation for our success. These values guide us continuously; improving our practices and ensure we dedicate our time to what truly matters. As an Observability Engineer in the SRE team, you will exemplify these key behaviours:

• Support and build trust with teammates, always assuming positive intent
• Communicate clearly and share knowledge to build shared understanding
• Stay curious, ask why, and always look to improve how things work
• Embrace change, adapt quickly, and take on a variety of challenges
• Drive innovation by looking for better ways forward and pushing for progress

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