AWS Observability or Grafana Architect
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Tech stack
Job description
Observability Architecture & Strategy
- Define and own the enterprise observability architecture for AWS environments - establishing the target-state design across the four pillars of observability: metrics, logs, traces, and events.
- Design end-to-end telemetry pipelines - from instrumentation at the application and infrastructure layer through collection, processing, storage, and visualisation - with Grafana as the enterprise observability platform.
- Develop observability standards and reference architectures - defining how AWS workloads across compute (EC2, EKS, ECS, Lambda), storage, networking, and managed services should be instrumented, collected, and visualised consistently across the organisation.
- Establish signal-to-noise discipline across the observability platform - designing alerting frameworks that surface actionable signals, eliminate false positives, and ensure on-call engineers are alerted only when human intervention is genuinely required.
- Define observability maturity roadmaps for client environments - assessing current-state coverage, identifying gaps, and building a phased improvement plan from reactive monitoring to proactive, AIOps-ready observability.
- Drive FinOps for observability - optimising telemetry data volumes, retention policies, and Grafana Enterprise licensing costs to ensure the observability platform itself does not become a significant cost centre.
Grafana Enterprise Implementation
- Architect, deploy, and operate Grafana Enterprise or Grafana SaaS as the primary observability platform - including high-availability Grafana deployment on AWS (EKS-based or managed via Grafana Cloud), data source federation, RBAC configuration, and enterprise plugin management.
- Design and implement Grafana data source integrations across the AWS observability ecosystem:
- Amazon CloudWatch - metrics, logs, and alarms as a core AWS data source
- Grafana Mimir - for scalable, long-term Prometheus-compatible metrics storage
- Grafana Loki - for cost-efficient, label-based log aggregation at scale
- Grafana Tempo - for distributed tracing storage and trace-to-log-to-metric correlation
- Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) - for AWS-native Prometheus metrics
- Amazon OpenSearch - for log analytics and full-text search use cases
- Elasticsearch / OpenSearch - for existing log infrastructure integration
- Build and maintain a Grafana dashboard library - covering infrastructure health, application performance, SLO/SLA tracking, capacity planning, cost visibility, incident response, and executive reporting - using reusable, variable-driven, and consistently styled templates.
- Implement Grafana alerting at enterprise scale - including alert routing, notification policies, silence management, and integration with PagerDuty, OpsGenie, ServiceNow, and Slack for multi-channel incident notification.
- Configure Grafana RBAC and team structures - designing role hierarchies, folder permissions, and data source access controls that enable self-service dashboarding for development teams while protecting sensitive operational data.
- Deploy and manage Grafana Oncall for on-call scheduling and alert routing, or integrate Grafana alerting with existing incident management platforms.
- Implement Grafana SLO (Service Level Objectives) - defining, tracking, and reporting error budgets across production services, enabling data-driven reliability decisions.
- Manage Grafana as code - using Grafana's provisioning capabilities (YAML/JSON), Terraform provider, and Grizzly/Grafonnet for dashboard version control, environment promotion, and GitOps-based dashboard management.
OpenTelemetry Implementation
- Define and lead the organisation's OpenTelemetry (OTel) instrumentation strategy - establishing standards for automatic and manual instrumentation across application stacks running on AWS.
- Design and deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector as the central telemetry processing layer - including:
- Collector deployment patterns: agent (DaemonSet on EKS), gateway (centralised), and sidecar configurations
- Receiver configuration - OTLP, Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, AWS X-Ray, CloudWatch, Fluent Bit
- Processor pipeline design - batch processing, memory limiting, attribute enrichment, tail-based sampling, and resource detection processors
- Exporter configuration - routing telemetry to Grafana Mimir (metrics), Grafana Loki (logs), Grafana Tempo (traces), AMP, and CloudWatch
- Instrument AWS workloads with OpenTelemetry SDKs across languages (Java, Python, Node.js, Go) - including auto-instrumentation for containerised EKS workloads, Lambda instrumentation using OTel Lambda layers, and ECS task definition instrumentation.
- Implement distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry - establishing trace propagation standards across microservices, configuring context propagation (W3C TraceContext, B3), and ensuring end-to-end trace visibility from frontend to backend to database.
- Design OTel-based log correlation - enriching logs with trace IDs and span IDs to enable trace-to-log navigation in Grafana, supporting faster RCA during incidents.
- Implement OTel-based metric instrumentation - defining custom business and application metrics alongside system metrics, following OTel semantic conventions for consistent metric naming and attribute tagging across services.
- Define sampling strategies for distributed traces - including head-based sampling for development environments and tail-based sampling (via OTel Collector) for production environments, balancing observability coverage with storage cost.
- Manage OTel Collector as infrastructure - including horizontal scaling, resource limits, high-availability deployment, collector health monitoring, and pipeline performance optimisation.
AWS Observability Services Integration
- Design the integration architecture between AWS-native observability services and Grafana - positioning Grafana as the unified observability plane while leveraging AWS-native services as data sources:
- Amazon CloudWatch - metrics, logs, alarms, dashboards, Contributor Insights, and Synthetics
- Amazon Managed Grafana (AMG) - evaluating and advising on AMG vs self-managed Grafana deployment decisions
- Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP) - remote write from OTel Collector and Prometheus agents, recording rules, and alert manager integration
- AWS X-Ray - ingesting X-Ray traces into Grafana Tempo or directly via Grafana X-Ray data source
- AWS CloudTrail - audit log integration for security and compliance observability
- VPC Flow Logs - network observability integration for security monitoring and traffic analysis
- Implement infrastructure-level observability for core AWS services - EC2 (CloudWatch agent, Node Exporter via OTel), EKS (kube-state-metrics, cAdvisor, OTel DaemonSet), RDS (Enhanced Monitoring, Performance Insights), Lambda (OTel Lambda layer, custom metrics), and API Gateway (access logs, CloudWatch metrics).
- Design business and synthetic monitoring - implementing Grafana Synthetic Monitoring or CloudWatch Synthetics for endpoint availability, API health, and user journey monitoring with Grafana alerting integration.
Delivery & Enablement
- Lead observability implementation projects end-to-end - from requirements gathering and architecture design through deployment, dashboard development, alert tuning, and team enablement.
- Conduct observability maturity assessments for client environments - evaluating current monitoring coverage, tool sprawl, alert quality, and SLO definition maturity, and producing prioritised remediation roadmaps.
- Develop and deliver observability enablement workshops for engineering and operations teams - covering OTel instrumentation, Grafana dashboard development, alert design, and on-call best practices.
- Produce observability architecture documentation - reference architectures, runbooks, onboarding guides, and dashboard documentation that enable teams to self-serve and maintain the platform.
- Advise on observability tool consolidation - helping organisations rationalise fragmented monitoring estates (Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Nagios, Zabbix) toward a unified Grafana + OTel platform, including migration planning and cost impact analysis.
Requirements
We are seeking a highly skilled AWS Observability Architect with deep, hands-on expertise in designing and implementing enterprise-grade observability platforms on AWS - with Grafana as the primary observability tool and OpenTelemetry as the instrumentation standard. This is a technical specialist role requiring genuine implementation experience, not platform familiarity.
The ideal candidate has personally architected and delivered large-scale observability solutions for production AWS environments - building telemetry pipelines, designing dashboards that operations teams actually use, and creating alerting frameworks that reduce MTTR rather than add noise. You understand the full observability stack: from application instrumentation with OpenTelemetry SDKs through to Grafana dashboards consumed by SREs, on-call engineers, and engineering leadership.
This role sits at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, software engineering discipline, and operational excellence - requiring someone who can design an enterprise observability architecture in the morning, write a Grafana dashboard query in the afternoon, and advise a development team on OpenTelemetry instrumentation strategy the next day., * 10+ years of overall experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or DevOps.
- 5+ years of hands-on AWS experience in production environments - not advisory or oversight roles.
- 3+ years of hands-on Grafana Enterprise or SaaS implementation experience - designing, deploying, and operating Grafana at enterprise scale, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and the LGTM stack.
- Proven experience implementing OpenTelemetry in production environments - including OTel Collector deployment, SDK-based instrumentation, and distributed tracing implementation.
- Demonstrated experience building production-grade observability pipelines - from instrumentation through collection, processing, storage, and visualisation.
- Hands-on experience with PromQL for metrics querying and alerting - including complex queries, recording rules, and alert expression design.
- Experience with LogQL (Grafana Loki) for log querying and log-based alerting.
- Hands-on experience deploying observability infrastructure on Kubernetes (EKS) - including Prometheus Operator, OTel DaemonSets, Grafana deployment, and persistent storage configuration.
- Experience with Grafana as code - provisioning dashboards, data sources, and alert rules via YAML, Terraform, or Grafonnet.