Lead Observability & Platform Engineer

In line with testing standards/procedures, under guidance of management, and within operating plan and allocated budget, to lead, plan and participate in qualification and acceptance testing activities of high complexity related to hardware and software components of SWIFT networks ensuring product quality. To act as a technical lead on qualification projects.

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Lead Engineer to drive the evolution of our Observability Platform, focusing on ELK stack products. In this pivotal role, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and continuously improving our observability and monitoring capabilities, ensuring systems remain scalable and meet global standards. You will co-lead the vision and strategy for CI/CD processes across development, release, and deployment lifecycles, taking ownership of building and optimizing automated CI/CD pipelines and release orchestration. Your expertise will enable the delivery of high-quality, reliable software at speed while maintaining performance.

Key Responsibilities

Co-lead the ELK platform

• Architect, deploy, and scale Elasticsearch clusters (hot-warm-cold tiers, ILM, snapshot/restore).
• Design ingestion with Logstash/Beats/Elastic Agent; standardize parsing (grok processors), mappings, and templates.
• Implement APM/tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry) and align logs/metrics/traces for end-to-end visibility.
• Build dashboards (Kibana) and analyst-friendly views; automate alerting and anomaly detection.
• Govern access (RBAC), encryption, masking; manage capacity & cost efficiency (index strategies, routing).

Co-lead DevOps & Release Orchestration

• Own CI/CD pipelines end-to-end (build, test, package, scan, deploy, rollback).
• Create pipelines for infra and content (Ansible for infra; version dashboards, index templates, alert rules).
• Implement automated release/deployment orchestration

Leadership & Collaboration

• Mentor engineers; lead technical design reviews and roadmap planning.
• Collaborate with Security/Compliance for security, auditability and data governance.
• Advocate observability standards across engineering (structured logging, trace context propagation).

What will make you successful?

• Experience: 12+ years in software development including data/platform/DevOps engineering; 3+ with ELK at scale (hot-warm-cold, ILM, index templates).
• Education: University degree in Computer Science, software engineer or equivalent.

Technical Skills:

• Data & Streaming – Deep knowledge of ingesting, processing, and managing large-scale data using big data platforms or messaging/streaming tools with key technologies of Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana, Kafka;
  Equivalent technologies such as Solr/AWS OpenSearch/Algolia, Apache NiFi/Fluentd/Beats, RabbitMQ/AWS Kinesis/Apache Pulsar.
• Observability & Monitoring – Deep knowledge of Elasticsearch internals (shards/replicas, ILM, index patterns, snapshots, query tuning); experience with APM, traces, metrics, logs, alerting strategies, and on-call operations. Or equivalent knowledge of distributed data platform internals, including data partitioning, replication, index or structure management.
• Programming & Databases - Proficiency in Java or Python with solid OOP fundamentals; experience with relational (Oracle, MySQL) and NoSQL databases. Experience in Relational Database (e.g. Oracle, MySQL) or NoSQL Databases.
• DevOps & CI/CD - Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools (Jenkins/Cloudbees, OpenShift, Ansible, Docker); familiarity with DevOps principles and supporting product delivery for monitoring and messaging platforms.
• Architecture & Integration: Experience with SOA technologies, microservices, REST/SOAP APIs; proficiency in both Linux and Windows environments. Experience working within an Agile-driven environment

Professional Skills:

• Experience in Agile-driven environments; ability to collaborate with distributed teams across time zones.
• Strong interpersonal skills and customer-centric mindset; able to build strong partnerships with internal stakeholders and delivery organizations.
• Familiarity with ITIL or structured operational processes (Incident Management, Problem Management, Continual Improvement) for maintaining and improving service delivery.

Following Experience will give candidates an added advantage:

• Experience in mentoring or leading engineering teams.
• Exposure to cloud observability or analytics platforms (Grafana, Splunk, or equivalent).
• Experience in API benchmarking with tools such as JMeter, Postman.
• Knowledge of Swift products and messaging services (Alliance Access, SwiftNet...).
• Knowledge of Atlassian products (Jira/Confluence/…).
• Knowledge of ServiceNow.

What we offer

We give you the freedom to be yourself. We are creating an environment of unique individuals – like you – with different perspectives on the financial industry and the world. A diverse and inclusive environment in which everyone’s voice counts and where you can reach your full potential.

We are committed to an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. If you require a reasonable accommodation related to accessibility during your application or interview, please contact [email protected] or indicate this in your application.

Please note that this mailbox is not monitored for general recruitment enquiries and should only be used for accessibility or accommodation-related requests (for example related to vision, hearing or neurodiversity).

All requests are confidential and will not affect your candidacy.

Don’t meet every single requirement? At Swift, we are dedicated to building a workplace where people can bring their full selves and ideas to the team, so if you are excited about this role, we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every single qualification.