Principal Engineer in Essex

Principal Software Engineer Location: Cambridge Our client is scaling a large, distributed cloud platform and is looking for a Principal Engineer to act as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) across observability and cloud infrastructure. Youll be working at serious scale managing thousands of Kubernetes nodes, handling tens of terabytes of logs daily, and supporting millions of real-time metrics across a highly distributed environment. The Role This is a senior, hands-on role where you will own the technical direction and standards of the observability ecosystem. As the SME, youll define best practice, guide architectural decisions, and act as the go-to expert across engineering teams, ensuring scalable, cost-efficient, and high-performance systems. Key Responsibilities Act as the SME for observability and cloud infrastructure across the organisation Lead architecture across metrics, logs, and tracing systems Design and optimise high-throughput data pipelines and storage layers Implement strategies such as sampling, aggregation, and down-sampling Extend and enhance open-source obse…