Senior Manager - Observability

This is Adyen

Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition. 

For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.



Senior Manager Observability

Adyen is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Observability domain inside our Platform Engineering organization. This is an exciting role where you will be able to shape the future of our Observability platform. Observability plays a key role in providing comprehensive data to a wide variety of use cases, ensuring the Adyen platform’s reliability and supporting our operations to run smoothly. The Observability team will build and maintain products and services that enable engineers at Adyen to understand how their services are behaving in real-time, reliably diagnose issues and streamline data discovery through a common observability ecosystem. Between logs, metrics and traces, our platform collects and processes billions of events per day, from the Java services powering the main Adyen platform to low-level metrics (e.g., Linux logs or device metrics) and everything in between. The Senior Engineering Manager will be responsible for leading this group to achieve a "products-on-a-platform" vision for our observability ecosystem as well as grow the team as needed globally.


What you will do

• Lead and grow the Observability organization: You will directly manage and hire engineering managers for the Instrumentation, Telemetry Infrastructure, and Observability Experience teams and several senior and/or staff level individual contributors. You will be responsible for scaling the teams and their individual members to meet the strategic goals of the observability platform. As well as hiring and growing the teams as required in Amsterdam or abroad.
• Drive the strategic vision: You will lead the transition from today’s observability platform toward the newly envisioned “products-on-a-platform” model. This means both operating and maintaining the current platform while steering its evolution. A key part of your role will be driving the organizational and technical change required to unify tools, standardize practices, and ensure adoption of the new platform across Adyen.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence: Ensure that technical decisions across all three teams are globally optimized, supporting the strategic direction of the platform. You'll work closely with Senior Engineers and other Leads to drive the design and implementation of the platform while ensuring the systems are reliable and available.
• Integrate observability into the SDLC: You will be responsible for ensuring Observability is integrated into the SDLC and offers a “golden-path” or "batteries included” strategy. This includes ensuring new services are provisioned with observability pre-configured by default, with necessary hooks for metrics, logging, and tracing already in place. Our observability platform has more than 20K servers producing data points and we support roughly 1.5K Applications that produce metrics, logs and training metadata that power the main Adyen Payments Platform.
• Address key challenges: Your leadership will drive projects to solve scalability challenges on our petabyte-scale logging clusters and phase out legacy systems while championing new tools and innovations. You will guide the migration to Kubernetes for some services and re-architect to solve potential performance issues. On a normal day, we are ingesting 750K/sec logs, 27M/sec metrics, 200K/sec spans for tracing.
• Collaborate across the organization: Work closely with the Senior Product Manager and various stakeholders, including other Platform Engineering teams and our primary target users, to align on the vision and execution strategy. You will also ensure close collaboration with core processes like incident management.

 

Who you are

• Experienced engineering leader: You have a proven track record of managing and growing multiple engineering teams (where you have managed managers) preferably within a platform or infrastructure-focused domains. You have 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 4+ years in leadership roles managing managers and/or multiple engineering teams.
• Observability domain knowledge: You possess a deep understanding of observability concepts, including logs, metrics, and traces, and have experience with technologies like OpenTelemetry. You have experience with Open Source and commercial solutions in the observability space (e.g., Grafana, Honeycomb.io, PagerDuty, Incident.io) and making strategic decisions about their adoption.
• Platform-minded: You have experience building platforms that serve a variety of internal customer segments and have successfully navigated the challenges of integrating new technology into existing processes. 
  Strong communicator: You can effectively communicate complex technical concepts to a wide range of audiences, from individual contributors to senior leadership with professional proficiency in English.
• Hands-on leader: While this is a senior management role, you are comfortable having technical technical / domain relevant discussion in order to guide your teams and ensure technical decisions are sound.
• Strategic thinker: You are able to define and execute a clear vision and strategy for a complex technical platform. You understand how to align technical decisions with business goals.
• Nice to haves: Prior experience in a FinTech or a similar regulated industry where reliability and security are paramount. Familiarity with the challenges and opportunities of incorporating AI into products, especially in how it impacts observability and automated testing.
  
  

 

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments 

Our unique approach is a product of our diverse perspectives. This diversity of backgrounds and cultures is essential in helping us maintain our momentum. Our business and technical challenges are unique, and we need as many different voices as possible to join us in solving them - voices like yours. No matter who you are or where you’re from, we welcome you to be your true self at Adyen. 

Studies show that women and members of underrepresented communities apply for jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. Does this sound like you? If so, Adyen encourages you to reconsider and apply. We look forward to your application!

 

What’s next?

Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days. Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role. Learn more about our hiring process here. Don’t be afraid to let us know if you need more flexibility.

 

Office policy

This role is based out of our Amsterdam office. We are an office-first company and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.

 

 

 

Client-provided location(s): Amsterdam, Netherlands

Job ID: 7256852

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-10-19T18:33:04