Senior Observability Engineer

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