Observability Tech Lead

Note: Positions are based in London, Berlin or Paris — relocation support is provided if required.

The Best Work of Your Career

Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe, operating in 18 countries and serving over 10 million customers with more than €150 B in assets.

Our mission is to empower everyone to build wealth through easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will grow your career by collaborating with a talented team and cutting‑edge technology.

About Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic’s engineering velocity. The ~50‑person team builds scalable platforms for a Europe‑scale bank, serving internal engineers and creating in‑house control planes for managing the bank’s infrastructure. The focus is on enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default.

The Observability Journey

In 2023 we transitioned from an observability‑as‑a‑service provider to a fully self‑hosted stack, giving us control over cost, data residency, and telemetry experience. The stack includes the LGTM suite (Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo), VictoriaMetrics, self‑hosted Sentry, Grafana Alloy, and OpenTelemetry. We use Pyrra for SLO tracking and build a unified service‑health dashboard. The platform ingests over 100 million samples and serves 400+ services, providing end‑to‑end traces for all trades and card payments.

What You’ll Be Doing

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

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in observability, platform engineering, or a related SRE/infrastructure discipline.
• Senior to staff level candidates—strong foundations with ownership or leaders of large‑scale observability strategy are encouraged to apply.
• Deep hands‑on expertise with the observability stack—Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo.
• Proven ability to design and operate high‑throughput telemetry pipelines across distributed, multi‑cloud environments.
• Strong command of SLO‑based reliability practices, including error budgets, burn‑rate alerting, and incident response tooling.
• Cloud‑native experience: Kubernetes, Terraform, and production workloads on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Track record of turning observability best practices into adopted standards.
• Experience driving cross‑team technical initiatives end to end.
• Ability to contribute to architectural decisions and communicate trade‑offs to engineers and leadership.
• Ready to work flexibly in a hybrid setup, with 2–3 days a week in the office.

We believe it’s our team’s varied identities and backgrounds that make us sharper and stronger. For any questions on DEI during the interview process, reach out to your recruitment partner.