What are the responsibilities and job description for the Global Observability Team Lead position at Optiver?
WHO WE ARE
Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam, with offices in London, Chicago, Austin, New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai. Established in 1986, today we are a leading liquidity provider, with close to 2,000 employees in offices around the world, united in our commitment to improve the market through competitive pricing, execution and risk management. By providing liquidity on multiple exchanges across the world in various financial instruments we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets. We provide liquidity to financial markets using our own capital, at our own risk, trading a wide range of products: listed derivatives, cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign currencies.
Optiver’s Sydney office is one of the primary players within Asian markets, trading a range of products. Established in 1996, we're an active participant on the Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan exchanges, and act as Optiver’s APAC head office.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
We are looking for a Head of Observability Platform to lead observability as a business-critical platform capability across our globally distributed trading environment.
Observability at Optiver has evolved across multiple teams, regions, systems, and platforms. We have a capable but heterogeneous foundation across logs, metrics, telemetry pipelines, dashboards, alerting, and production diagnostics. We have formed a dedicated team to advance observability as a standalone platform capability: globally consistent, easy to adopt, reliable at scale, and deeply embedded in how Optiver builds, operates, diagnoses, and improves production systems.
As Head of Observability Platform, you will own the strategy, architecture, operating model, adoption approach, and roadmap for Optiver’s shared observability platform. The platform enables engineers, operators, trading teams, automated systems, and future agent-based workflows to collect, query, understand, and act on metrics, logs, traces, events, alerts, and health signals across Optiver’s global environment.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will not be the primary implementer of every system, but you will need the depth to challenge designs, guide architectural trade-offs, unblock engineers, and make high-quality decisions. You will lead a globally distributed team of engineers, partner closely with engineering stakeholders, and shape the standards, tooling, and practices that make observability effective at scale.
Your goal is to transform observability into a globally consistent, regionally federated platform capability. Your work will improve production diagnosis, reduce operational risk, increase platform resilience, improve developer experience, and strengthen confidence in Optiver’s trading systems.
In this role, you will:
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Set the global strategy, architecture, operating model, and roadmap for Optiver’s observability platform.
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Lead and develop a globally distributed team of engineers, shaping team mandate, ways of working, and capability.
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Define what “good observability” means at Optiver, including expectations for telemetry quality, instrumentation, alerting, dashboards, service health, and diagnostic workflows.
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Guide technical direction across telemetry collection, ingestion, storage, query, visualization, alerting, eventing, automation, and platform reliability.
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Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, and cost-effectiveness of the platform as adoption and telemetry volumes grow.
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Improve developer and operator experience through self-service workflows, golden paths, documentation, reusable patterns, APIs, dashboards, and investigation tooling.
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Partner with engineering teams to drive adoption.
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
You are an experienced technical leader who combines platform strategy, architectural judgement, people leadership, and delivery discipline. You are comfortable setting long-term direction while engaging deeply enough to challenge designs, make trade-offs, and help teams execute.
You understand that observability is not just a tooling problem. It is a platform, standards, reliability, developer experience, and adoption problem. You know how to build systems that engineers trust, operators can rely on, and the business can depend on during high-pressure production situations.
You will bring:
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Proven experience leading engineering, SRE, platform, infrastructure, or observability teams in a complex technical environment.
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Experience owning or shaping a platform capability, including strategy, roadmap, architecture, operating model, adoption, governance, and measurable outcomes.
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Deep understanding of modern observability practices across logs, metrics, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, telemetry pipelines, diagnostics, instrumentation quality, and service health.
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Experience designing or leading large-scale observability platforms, including ingest pipelines, storage backends, query systems, retention models, visualization, alerting, resilience, and scale-related trade-offs.
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Strong technical judgement, people leadership, and delivery discipline.
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Ability to influence without direct control across engineering teams.
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A pragmatic approach to platform adoption, balancing global standardisation with regional autonomy, local production needs, and existing systems.