At a Glance
- Tasks: Own and enhance IG's observability platform, ensuring reliability and scalability.
- Company: Join IG Group, a leading global fintech company with a dynamic culture.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, flexible benefits, private medical cover, and generous holiday allowance.
- Other info: Thrive in a supportive environment with opportunities for growth and community engagement.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on high-stakes systems while collaborating with talented teams.
- Qualifications: 5-8 years in observability or SRE roles, with hands-on experience in relevant tools.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.
Location: London
Employment type: Permanent, Full Time
Reporting into: Senior Engineering Manager – SRE and Observability
About IG Group
IG Group (LSE: IGG) is a leading global fintech company, established in 1974 and headquartered in London. As a constituent of the FTSE 100, IG Group provides dynamic online trading platforms and a robust educational ecosystem, empowering ambitious individuals worldwide in their pursuit of financial freedom.
About the role
IG Group’s systems move billions of dollars every day – and our clients expect them to be fast, reliable, and transparent. As an Observability Engineer, you will own the platforms and practices that give IG’s engineering teams deep, real-time insight into how those systems behave. This is a high-impact, hands-on role at the centre of our reliability engineering agenda: building on Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry, driving instrumentation across a globally distributed microservices estate, and partnering directly with development teams to turn telemetry data into better, faster software.
About the team
This role sits within the Observability team, part of IG’s broader SRE and Platform Engineering function. The team is responsible for the tools, platforms, and standards that enable engineering teams across IG to understand and improve system behaviour at scale. You will report into the Senior Engineering Manager for SRE and Observability and work as an individual contributor, partnering closely with development squads, platform engineers, and incident response teams.
Key responsibilities
- Platform ownership: Build, maintain, and evolve IG’s Honeycomb-centric observability platform, ensuring it is reliable, scalable, and fit for a complex, globally distributed trading environment. Define platform standards, data models, and integration patterns for telemetry collection, storage, and querying across the estate.
- Instrumentation and telemetry: Drive OpenTelemetry adoption across engineering teams, providing hands-on guidance and reusable instrumentation patterns for services built in Java, Python, and C++. Partner with development teams to improve telemetry coverage, ensuring meaningful traces, metrics, and logs are in place across critical services and user journeys.
- SLOs: Apply a strong understanding of SLOs, burn rates, and alert triggers to help service owners define meaningful reliability targets and translate them into actionable observability signals. Work closely with SRE teams to drive SLO adoption across the organisation, providing guidance and practical support to help engineering teams embed reliability targets into their day-to-day ways of working.
- Incident response: Join the support rota and incident response, using observability tooling to accelerate diagnosis and reduce mean time to resolution. Lead post-incident reviews that produce actionable improvements to both systems and observability coverage.
- Enablement and community: Mentor and upskill engineers across IG on observability principles and practices, raising the bar for how teams instrument, monitor, and debug their services. Develop training materials, runbooks, and best-practice guides that scale observability knowledge across the engineering organisation.
Role requirements
- Proven hands-on experience with Honeycomb or a similar observability tool such as Grafana, including dataset design, query building, and using it as a primary tool for production debugging and reliability analysis.
- Strong practical experience implementing OpenTelemetry instrumentation in one or more of Java, Python, or C++, including custom collectors, exporters, and sampling strategies.
- Experience working in complex, distributed microservices environments with high transaction volumes or strict reliability requirements.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills – able to work effectively with development teams and influence engineering practice without direct authority.
- Practical experience with Terraform for managing observability infrastructure as code, including provisioning and maintaining platform components in a cloud environment.
- Ability and willingness to cover UK working hours to support collaboration with IG’s London-based engineering teams.
- 5–8 years of relevant experience in observability, SRE, or platform engineering roles.
Desirable
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP, particularly in the context of observability and infrastructure monitoring.
- Familiarity with other observability tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus, or Splunk, and experience migrating or consolidating observability stacks.
- Exposure to fintech, financial services, or other regulated industry environments.
- Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source observability projects or OTel instrumentation libraries.
The Perks
- Competitive salary
- Flexible Benefits Package on top of your salary (12%)
- Private medical cover for you and your family
- Life insurance
- Contribution to gym memberships
- 25 Days holiday, with 1 additional day off to celebrate your Birthday & 2 additional days off a year for voluntary work (28 in total)
- The option to buy or sell holiday days.
- Unlimited access to the LinkedIn Learning Platform
- A comprehensive global and local onboarding process
- Employee-led LGBTQ+, Women’s, Black and Parents & Carers networks with an annual budget for organising events & projects that foster an open, diverse and inclusive culture
- Enhanced primary (maternity), secondary (paternity), and shared parental pay and leave, as well as a range of support and benefits for parents
- Option to participate and create ESG initiatives based on IG Brighter Future Fund
Senior Observability Engineer in London employer: IG Group
IG Group is an exceptional employer located in the heart of London, offering a vibrant work culture that fosters innovation and collaboration. Employees benefit from a commitment to professional growth through continuous learning opportunities and the chance to work with cutting-edge AI tools in a dynamic fintech environment. With a focus on flexibility and efficiency, IG Group ensures that its team members thrive while contributing to meaningful recruitment processes.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Senior Observability Engineer in London
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at IG Group or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to IG Group.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
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Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like IG Group that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Senior Observability Engineer in London
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at IG Group.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at IG Group and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at IG Group
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If IG Group uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
