Observability SRE in London

Job/Group Overview:

• SRE within the Group Platform Services & Engineering division which provides the common services to Development, Infrastructure and Production Services.

• This is an SRE/support position responsible for administering and supporting the Production environment as well as engineering reliability into the products / services we support

• i.e. monitoring & observability platform. The successful candidate will have a vital role in shaping future monitoring strategy and direction.

• A fantastic opportunity for somebody with 3+ years IT experience to work with state-of-the-art technologies to deliver industry leading solutions in the Telemetry,Observability and Monitoring space.

• The successful candidate would join a team of enthusiastic, creative and forward-thinking SRE in the UK who are working in tandem with the engineers to radically transform how the Group manages the operation of its estate.

• The position is within a global team consisting of 20 team members, across Engineering and SRE, bringing change across the organisation.

• The candidate will work closely with their peers in other regions as well as other teams to facilitate the strategic objectives of the team.

• The challenges we strive to solve include availability, scalability and performance related to delivering a platform used by the entire Group.

The observability platform consists of a combination of platforms and frameworks from in-house, vendors, and open source. These include:

• Grafana LGTM stack (open source)

• RightITNow, EverBridge, Sentinel (3rd Party tools)

• AMBER, Bing, MCM, CMS (homegrown)

Responsibilities:

• Cross functional engagement to champion and provide necessary support for the adoption of TOM platform across the group of companies.

• Gain understanding of the various tools and frameworks that together provide observability and notification service to the organization and assist development and production support teams with queries / issues related to their usage of our platform.

• Act as custodian of production environment and engage within the team and outside, if need be, towards building and maintaining robust, scalable, highly

• available production systems in accordance with our service level objectives

• Preventing production incidents but when they do occur, performing effective incident and problem management and RCA to minimize downtime as well as

• possibility of recurrence.

• Pushing out changes and releases to production environment reliably via effective change and release management

• Quick and effective response to alerts before they become incidents, with an approach to prevent them from occurring ever again

• Effectively triaging alerts, requests, emails such that things that needs attention get addressed first and in a timely manner in the order of their priority, the drivers for which should be production stability and user satisfaction.

• Continuous and effective engagement with users, with the required empathy,providing the right guidance so as to provide a good customer experience

• Collaborate in a global agile team environment using established support practices, participating in sprint planning, reviews, and continuous improvement initiatives

• Build and maintain scalable, reliable monitoring solutions that support global infrastructure

• Engage with engineers, architect towards contributing to architectural decisions that influence the future direction of observability platform

• Champion observability best practices across the organization, helping teams leverage data-driven insights to improve system reliability and performance

• Partner with engineers as needed to optimize operational efficiency and enhance system resilience

• Effectively leveraging AI tools such as Claude, CoPilot etc. with adequate guardrails to bring efficiencies into operational processes in a consistent, repeatable and risk averse manner.

• Mentor and guide other SREs, sharing your knowledge and expertise across other team members for the benefit of the team.

Requirements (indicate mandatory and/or preferred):
Mandatory:

• Minimum 2 years’ experience with Grafana or any other modern observability tools in an administrative capacity for a medium/large scale enterprise.

• At least 2 years’ exposure to Linux OS with a decent hold on general purpose troubleshooting and day to day commands

• Exposure to one or more of following – Python / Ansible

• Production support experience – Request handling, incident management,problem management, change management, release management, on-call

• handling, user engagement, responding to alerts etc.

• Good communication and interpersonal skills

• Strong analytical and trouble-shooting skills, with the ability to exercise mature judgement

• Basic understanding of cloud platforms

• Basic understanding of CI/CD tools such as GitLab, Jenkins, Ansible, Nexus etc.

• Good Team player

Preferred:

• Understanding of Open Telemetry standards

• Understanding of containerization technologies such as Kubernetes, EKS, Docker etc.

• Supporting a medium / large scale production environment

• Exposure to AI tools and their usage for increasing work efficiency

• Knowledge of ITIL

• Decent understanding of DB Platforms – Sybase / MySQL / MSSQL – general RDBMS concepts, SQL

• Collaboration Tools – Confluence / JIRA

• Basic knowledge of / familiarity with other infrastructure technologies such as Middleware (ActiveMQ / Solace / EMS / Tibco etc.), Web servers, Load

• balancers, Directory Services etc.

• Experience working with a globally dispersed team