Senior Java Engineer - Observability

Senior Software Engineer (Observability Platform) – Java | OpenTelemetry | Kubernetes | Multi-Cloud

Tech Stack: Java 17/21, Spring Boot, OpenTelemetry, Micrometer, Kubernetes, OTLP, OpenTelemetry Collector, AWS, Azure, GCP, New Relic, Datadog, Distributed Systems, Terraform

What You'll Do:

Join a high-calibre engineering team building the internal observability platform that powers a large-scale, cloud-native software platform deployed across public cloud, private cloud and customer-managed infrastructure.

You'll take ownership of the telemetry platform that enables engineering teams to monitor, troubleshoot and operate production services at scale. Rather than building application features, you'll create the foundations that every engineering team relies on—standardising instrumentation, telemetry pipelines and operational best practices across the organisation.

Your work will include:

• Designing and evolving a vendor-neutral observability platform using OpenTelemetry.
• Building reusable Java libraries, Spring Boot starters and instrumentation standards adopted across multiple engineering teams.
• Developing telemetry pipelines for metrics, logs and traces that work consistently across AWS, Azure, GCP, on-premise and Kubernetes environments.
• Defining SLIs, SLOs and alerting strategies that improve reliability while reducing operational noise.
• Partnering with engineering teams to improve instrumentation quality and developer experience.
• Optimising telemetry pipelines for scalability, cost efficiency and long-term maintainability.
• Owning the services you build through production support, incident response and continuous platform improvements.

Who They Are:

Our client is a well-funded technology company building highly scalable software used by enterprise customers around the world. Their engineering culture is centred around platform excellence, distributed systems and developer productivity, with significant investment in modern engineering practices and AI-assisted software development.

The business operates globally and builds products that demand exceptional reliability, security and performance across cloud-native and customer-managed deployments. Engineers are given genuine ownership of technical direction, work alongside experienced platform specialists and have the opportunity to solve complex infrastructure challenges that impact every engineering team.

What Is In It For You:

• Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits package.
• Opportunity to shape the observability strategy for a global software platform.
• Work on technically challenging distributed systems at significant scale.
• Join a collaborative engineering culture that values technical depth and high-quality software engineering.
• Exposure to modern cloud-native technologies, Kubernetes and multi-cloud architectures.
• Work with experienced engineers who prioritise clean architecture, platform thinking and continuous improvement.
• Hybrid working with offices in either Abu Dhabi or London.

Who You Are:

We're looking for an engineer who enjoys building internal platforms rather than customer-facing applications and has a passion for observability, reliability and distributed systems.

You'll ideally have:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with Java.
• Strong experience with Java 17/21 and Spring Boot.
• Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry, including instrumentation, telemetry pipelines and the OpenTelemetry Collector.
• Experience building observability platforms, shared libraries or developer tooling used across multiple engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices and Kubernetes.
• Experience deploying and operating software across cloud and on-premise environments.
• Knowledge of metrics, logging, tracing, SLIs, SLOs, alerting and operational excellence.
• Experience integrating observability platforms such as New Relic, Datadog, AppDynamics, Grafana or similar.
• A proactive engineering mindset with experience owning systems through design, implementation and production operations.

Experience contributing to open-source observability projects or operating large-scale telemetry platforms would be highly advantageous.