Observability Engineer in London

Music is Universal

It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation.

We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

Job Summary:

We are UMG, the Universal Music Group. We are the world’s leading music company. In everything we do, we are committed to artistry, innovation and entrepreneurship. We own and operate a broad array of businesses engaged in recorded music, music publishing, merchandising, and audiovisual content in more than 60 countries. We identify and develop recording artists and songwriters, and we produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to delight and entertain fans around the world.

We are seeking a talented and proactive Observability Engineer to join our dynamic global team. You will be passionate about data driven decisions, automation, and committed to continuous improvement. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in building, maintaining, and enhancing the comprehensive observability solutions that ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of our critical IT systems and applications across the globe. You’ll work at the intersection of technology and the vibrant world of music, providing deep insights that drive operational excellence and enable rapid response to any challenge.

Job Functions:

• Design & Implementation: Working with the team to ensure our observability stack provides world-class services through the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of our environment, encompassing monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems across diverse cloud-native, on-premise, and hybrid environments.

• Innovate with Tooling: Evaluate, select, and implement leading observability tools and platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, AWS Cloudwatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, OpenTelemetry), and automate our observability pipelines and alerting mechanisms working with development teams to ensure.

• Champion Best Practices: Help define, enforce, and advocate for observability standards and best practices across all engineering and operations teams, ensuring consistent instrumentation and visibility throughout our global organization.

• Develop Robust Monitoring: Create and maintain powerful monitoring solutions, intuitive dashboards, and automated alerts to provide real-time insights into system health, performance, and availability.

• Drive Incident Resolution: Work with the Operations teams to utilizing telemetry data for swift diagnosis and resolution, and conducting post-incident reviews to enhance our systems.

• Collaborate & Empower: Partner across other teams in the wider UMG global Technology team to drive positive change, influencing and driving best practice within the Observability space for their ultimate benefit. Working closely with development, SRE, and infrastructure teams to embed observability throughout the entire technology lifecycle, empowering teams with the insights they need.

• Optimize Performance: Analyze telemetry data to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, optimize resource allocation, and fine-tune configurations for peak efficiency.

• Support Compliance & Security: Contribute to our compliance and security efforts through effective log management and integration with SIEM systems.

• Other Essential Components:

• o Work independently to deliver results while acting as part of a global team to design and implement robust solutions across a hybrid, complex ecosystem of systems.

• o Undertake system analysis based on Observability notifications to troubleshoot complex issues to improve value from UMG’s technology investments, working with a mindset of continual improvement.

• o Take an active part in documenting and defining processes and best practice.

• Make UMG the place to be: Actively taking part in making the Observability team a positive and respectful place to be. UMG is a place where everyone can bring themselves fully to work and thrive, as a key part of the Technology department you are an important part of building our culture.

Job Requirements:

• Experience: 3+ years of hands-on experience in an Observability, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or DevOps role, with a dedicated focus on observability.

• Technical Expertise:

  · Strong understanding and practical experience with monitoring, logging, and tracing systems.

  · Proficiency with industry-standard observability tools (e.g., Dynatrace, AWS Cloudwatch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Splunk, Logic Monitor).

  · Strong technical knowledge with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

  · Solid programming and scripting skills (e.g., Python, Go, Shell, JavaScript) for automation.

  · Understanding of distributed systems, microservices architectures, and cloud-native environments. Experience with Docker/Kubernetes and DevOps principles

  · Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools (e.g., Ansible, Terraform).

• Problem-Solving: Exceptional analytical and problem-solving abilities, with a proactive approach to tackling complex technical challenges.

• Communication: Excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences.

• Domain Knowledge: Prior experience supporting critical business applications within a large-scale, global enterprise environment.

• Security Awareness: Awareness of security best practices and the ability to integrate security monitoring into observability processes.

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Self-motivated with high degree of initiative and excellent follow-up skills, along with strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

• Travel may be required but is not part of the regular work schedule.

Desired Qualifications:

• Advanced Concepts: Experience with Chaos Engineering, Canary/BlueGreen deployment strategies, capacity planning, data analysis, networking.

• Software Engineering: Experience in designing and automating Observability workloads with a foundation in software engineering, database administration and system administration. Scripting and programming for Observability as well as troubleshooting across Python, Go, Java and associated languages.

• Certifications: Relevant industry certifications (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Kubernetes certifications).

Just So You Know…

The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder’s specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.

Job Category:

Universal Music Group