Senior DevOps Engineer – Observability

Introduction to Role

Are you ready to harness observability to keep world-scale science running at pace? Could you lead the strategy that helps researchers trust the platforms behind computational chemistry, genomics and AI-driven discovery while raising your own profile through visible, high-impact work?

As a Senior DevOps Engineer focused on Observability, you will shape how our Scientific Computing Platform is monitored and understood, turning signals into insights that prevent incidents and accelerate research. You will evolve our current Prometheus and Grafana landscape and guide a multi-year shift toward an enterprise-grade observability capability using commercial tooling such as Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, or Grafana Cloud — ensuring we can scale confidently as demand grows.

This hands-on senior role sits within a collaborative, globally distributed platform engineering team operating across cloud-native services and large-scale bare-metal estates. You will combine automation, reliability engineering, and deep telemetry expertise so scientists can compute with confidence and get treatments to patients faster.

Accountabilities

• Observability Platform Ownership: Operate, improve, and scale the Prometheus and Grafana stack on Kubernetes; define alerting strategies and build actionable dashboards that cut time-to-detection and time-to-recovery for critical services.

• Migration and Future Tooling: Lead our contribution to the centralized enterprise observability initiative; evaluate and prepare for adoption of commercial platforms (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana Cloud), building a clear path from today's stack to tomorrow's shared capability.

• Automation and GitOps: Increase reliability and repeatability through GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines; automate deployments and configuration to reduce manual effort and eliminate drift across environments.

• Platform Administration: Administer Ansible, Vault, Consul, Prometheus, and Grafana to underpin configuration, secrets management, monitoring, and observability functions across cloud and HPC estates.

• Incident Response and Resilience: Own high-severity incident response for the platform; drive root-cause analysis and implement improvements that raise availability, performance, and customer trust.

• Monitoring and Alerting: Establish proactive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting that give full-stack visibility and enable data-driven performance tuning and capacity planning.

• Engineering Best Practices: Evaluate and introduce emerging tools and practices that strengthen DevOps processes, improve developer experience, and advance platform capabilities.

• Documentation and Enablement: Produce clear, durable documentation and runbooks; enable platform users and partner teams to self-serve and build with confidence.

• Mentoring: Coach junior engineers and champion a culture of learning, openness, and continuous improvement across a distributed team.

Essential Skills/Experience

• Strong experience with observability tooling and platforms — Prometheus, Grafana, and ideally one or more commercial APM/observability platforms (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, or Grafana Cloud).
• Experience with application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, and performance tuning.
• Solid DevOps and platform engineering background: CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, containerization (Kubernetes/Docker), GitOps workflows, and shell scripting.
• Experience with configuration management and platform tooling such as Ansible, Vault, or Consul.
• Understanding of cloud technologies and engineering paradigms (AWS preferred but not exclusive).
• Experience using AI tooling to accelerate engineering delivery and improve quality.
• Familiarity with product-centric delivery models, DevOps culture, and Agile methodologies.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Comfortable working in a globally distributed team across multiple time zones.

Desirable Skills/Experience

• Experience operating or supporting high-performance computing (HPC) environments at scale — large server fleets, high-throughput storage, and workload scheduling (SLURM, LSF, or similar).
• Familiarity with the Grafana observability stack beyond core Grafana: Loki, Tempo, Mimir.
• Background or curiosity in biology, medicine, or scientific computing in a pharma/R&D context.
• Experience migrating between observability platforms or contributing to enterprise-wide tooling standardization efforts.

When we put unexpected teams in the same room, we unleash bold thinking with the power to inspire life-changing medicines. In-person working gives us the platform we need to connect, work at pace and challenge perceptions. That's why we work, on average, a minimum of three days per week from the office. But that doesn't mean we're not flexible. We balance the expectation of being in the office while respecting individual flexibility. Join us in our unique and ambitious world.

Why AstraZeneca

Here, your engineering will power real science — placing platform experts shoulder-to-shoulder with researchers to turn complex telemetry into decisions that speed discovery for patients. You will work with advanced HPC and cloud-native technologies, collaborate with diverse specialists, and help set enterprise standards for observability during a pivotal transformation. We encourage curiosity and evidence-led innovation, value kindness alongside ambition, and provide opportunities to showcase your work — whether presenting internally, contributing to communities, or publishing insights — so you grow your impact as you grow your craft.

Step into a role where your observability vision will shape enterprise platforms and accelerate breakthrough science — send your application and help build what's next!

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.