Senior/Staff Platform Observability Engineer

Job description

ROLE HIGHLIGHTS: - Senior/Staff Platform Observability Engineer - Location: Espoo, Finland / Berlin, Germany - Department: Platform & Release Engineering - Employment type: Permanent - Workplace model: Hybrid - Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO,) WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS: As a Platform Observability Engineer, you’ll make the health of ICEYE’s systems visible, actionable, and reliable. You’ll build and evolve the observability foundation across metrics, logs, and traces, helping teams detect issues early, understand failures faster, and operate their services with confidence. Your work will go beyond dashboards and alerts. You’ll reduce operational noise, eliminate blind spots, and give product teams the tools and autonomy to run reliable services. WHO WE ARE ICEYE is the world leader in sovereign intelligence from space. We deliver persistent monitoring capabilities to detect and respond to changes in any location on Earth. ICEYE owns the world's largest and most advanced SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation. To our customers we provide intelligence with unmatched quality, latency and revisit times, in any weather, day or night. To governments who choose to operate their own constellation we provide this proven capability as a sovereign system. ICEYE-built constellations serve customers in defence and intelligence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. We enable fast decisions that contribute to a safer future. Founded and headquartered in Finland, ICEYE operates globally with over 1000 employees across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. YOUR DAY-TO-DAY RESPONSIBILITIES - Own and continuously improve a unified, production-grade observability stack covering metrics, logs, and traces, giving every team a consistent, self-service way to understand and operate the health of their services. - Build and maintain trusted alerting by tuning alerts against clear SLOs/SLIs, reducing noise, improving ownership and ensuring real issues surface early. - Define, document, and drive adoption of instrumentation standards covering metric naming, label cardinality, structured logging, and distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry. - Enable product teams to diagnose and resolve incidents faster through well-designed dashboards, runbooks, hands-on support, and practical observability guidance. - Run the observability platform like a product, owning its roadmap, interfaces, reliability, scalability, and cost across areas such as retention, sampling, and cardinality. - Provide clear technical direction for observability across the engineering organisation, making pragmatic architectural trade-offs and helping teams adopt platform capabilities effectively. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR Must haves: 1. Observability platform ownership at scale 6+ years in Platform Engineering, Observability, or infrastructure roles, with end-to-end ownership of a production observability stack (for example the LGTM stack - Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir/Prometheus - or an equivalent metrics/logs/traces platform) at scale. - Instrumentation & telemetry: OpenTelemetry adoption, metric and label design, structured logging, and distributed tracing across complex, multi-team systems. - SLO/SLI & error budgets: dashboards and alerting that surface real problems early while minimizing noise and false positives. - Platform as a product: treating other engineering teams as customers, with clear interfaces and a roadmap shaped by their needs. - Alerting & reliability attitude: comfortable with on-call, driving blameless learning from incidents, and continuously tuning signal quality instead of letting alert fatigue set in. 2. Software engineering foundation - A background that includes time spent writing and shipping production software, bringing engineering instincts to building tooling and automation rather than only operating what already exists. - Proficiency in at least one backend language (for example Python or Go) for automation, tooling, and building internal observability capabilities. 3. Long-term ownership of your own decisions Demonstrated experience owning the long-term consequences of your own architectural and tooling decisions - having lived with what you built through its maintenance, upgrades, and failure modes, not just its initial rollout. 4. Communication Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, able to explain complex system behavior clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. Nice to haves: 1. Platform & telemetry breadth - Rancher, Istio, and Kubernetes-native observability patterns (service mesh telemetry, sidecars, eBPF-based tooling). - Bridging hybrid environments across AWS and on-prem platforms such as vSphere/VxRail. - Managing cost and cardinality on large-scale telemetry pipelines (retention policies, sampling, downsampling). 2. Practices that spread beyond your own team - Defining SLO/SLI frameworks or observability standards adopted across multiple teams. - Running or contributing to incident response and blameless postmortem processes. - Mentoring engineers and raising engineering maturity through technical leadership and enablement. 3. Domain context Background in regulated, security-sensitive, or mission-critical domains. APPLICATION PROCESS - Recruiter interview - Hiring manager interview - Task Assignment + Technical interview - Stakeholder interview - Behavioural interview to assess cultural fit WORKING AT ICEYE At ICEYE, you’ll join a diverse and highly engaged team united by the ambition to make the impossible possible. As a global scale-up, we combine speed and ambition with the opportunity to take real ownership from day one. Your growth, wellbeing, and success are a priority, with continuous professional development, training opportunities, and a culture where collaboration is how we win. HOW WE WORK (OUR VALUES) Make the impossible possible: We set ambitious goals and stay calm under pressure. We bring grit, optimism, and ownership when things get hard, and we keep moving until we find a way. - Be curious: Go deep, ask questions, listen carefully, and think critically. Understand the “why” behind decisions. - See the big picture: Stay close to what’s happening across the company so you can make better decisions. Consider how your work affects others. - Drive effective teamwork: Create psychological safety, invite different perspectives, and build inclusive teams. There are no bad questions. - Act as one team: We win together. We match tasks to the right owner and stay agile as priorities shift. - Have fun: What we do matters—and it should be enjoyable. Celebrate progress, take pride in results, and share the wins. BENEFITS Our benefits are designed to support your health and wellbeing, at work and beyond. We keep improving them based on employee feedback, and offerings vary by location. Talent Acquisition will confirm what applies for this role and location during the process. OUR COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION We want ICEYE to be a place where people can be themselves and do great work. Different backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger, which is why we work to create an environment where people feel included, respected, and able to speak up. Whatever your background, we want you to bring your authentic self to the table. We’re committed to fair, inclusive hiring and equal opportunity. Everyone is welcome to apply. If you need any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, tell us—we’ll do our best to help. Apply now to start your ICEYE journey, and help us continue to make the impossible possible together. Read more about ICEYE and working with us at iceye.com http://iceye.com.