Observability Tech Lead

About the role

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic's engineering velocity, building scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank. We're building a dedicated in-house observability team to take our self-hosted observability stack to the next level: stabilise and harden the platform, drive down cost-per-signal, and build the golden path for observability.

What you'll do

• Build and evolve the observability platform: Design and operate large-scale telemetry pipelines while continuously improving core components with a strong focus on automation, reliability, and developer experience.
• Build for scale, design for cost: Architect high-throughput telemetry systems with sampling strategies, data tiering, and retention policies that balance signal fidelity with infrastructure cost at scale.
• Make production observable by default: Define and implement observability and reliability standards — SLOs, error budgets, and low-noise alerting — and actively support engineering teams in adopting them, making doing the right thing effortless.
• Own the platform end to end: Participate in the on-call rotation for the observability platform, ensuring full end-to-end ownership of the systems you build and operate.
• Own the direction and drive it forward: Define long-term observability direction, drive cross-team initiatives from kickoff to delivery, and align observability strategy with broader engineering reliability and business goals.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of experience in observability, platform engineering, or a related SRE/infrastructure discipline.
• Deep hands-on expertise with the observability stack — Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, or equivalent at scale. Hands-on experience with Mimir, Loki, and Tempo architectures is a strong benefit.
• Proven ability to design and operate high-throughput telemetry pipelines across distributed, multi-cloud environments.
• Strong command of SLO-based reliability practices — error budgets, burn-rate alerting, and incident response tooling.
• Cloud-native in your DNA: hands-on with Kubernetes, Terraform, and running production workloads on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• A track record of turning observability best practices into opinionated standards that engineering teams actually adopt.
• Experience driving cross-team technical initiatives end-to-end, from ambiguous problem to shipped solution.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.