Principal Architect - Logging & Observability

Company Description

Experian is a global data and technology company, powering opportunities for people and businesses around the world. We help to redefine lending practices, uncover and prevent fraud, simplify healthcare, create marketing solutions, and gain deeper insights into the automotive market, all using our unique combination of data, analytics and software. We also assist millions of people to realize their financial goals and help them save time and money.

We operate across a range of markets, from financial services to healthcare, automotive, agribusiness, insurance, and many more industry segments.

We invest in people and new advanced technologies to unlock the power of data. As a FTSE 100 Index company listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN), we have a team of 22,500 people across 32 countries. Our corporate headquarters are in Dublin, Ireland. Learn more at experianplc.com.

Description

What You Will Be Doing

As a Principal Observability Engineer, you will lead the vision, strategy, and engineering implementation of Observability at scale across Experian's hybrid infrastructure and global product ecosystem. Responsibilities include:

Observability Platform Engineering

• Architect, design, and evolve Observability frameworks, instrumentation standards, and reusable libraries across compute, microservices, APIs, and data platforms.
• Lead the transition to Observability as Code, enabling Splunk, Cribl, Dynatrace, and future tool configurations to be fully version‑controlled, automated, and consumed via Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Build advanced distributed tracing solutions using OpenTelemetry, ensuring deep visibility across upstream and downstream systems.

• Build high‑quality APIs, SDKs, and automation frameworks that standardize Observability onboarding for engineering teams.
• Develop and maintain an API‑driven orchestration layer that abstracts underlying Observability tooling.
• Enable engineering teams to instrument applications through reusable code modules, templates, and policy‑driven automation.

• Evaluate, adopt, and deploy new Observability tooling, dashboards/tiles (tiling exposure), and visualization standards using infrastructure‑as‑code, pipelines, and programmatic configuration.
• Lead tooling modernization initiatives for synthetic monitoring, browser instrumentation, APM, logs, and telemetry ingestion.

• Work with platform, SRE, DevOps and product engineering teams to define, build, and mature end‑to‑end monitoring standards.
• Influence architecture decisions to ensure Observability considerations are embedded early across services.
• Partner with Cloud Engineering & Operations, leveraging practices from infrastructure self‑service programs

• Define the Observability roadmap, KPIs, and success criteria for global adoption.
• Mentor senior engineers, drive knowledge sharing, and build a culture of proactive Observability excellence.
• Contribute to engineering governance through patterns, blueprints, guardrails, and audit/compliance alignment.

• 10-15+ years in large‑scale engineering organizations with deep Observability ownership.
• Advanced proficiency in at least one coding language (Python, Go, Java preferred).
• Proven experience building APIs and API frameworks that enable self‑service consumption.
• Strong hands‑on in distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry, logs, metrics, events, and telemetry flow management.
• Expertise with tools such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Cribl, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, etc.
• Strong IaC skills using Terraform, Ansible; comfortable deploying full tooling ecosystems through CI/CD.
• 5+ years of experience managing Observability in ecosystems with multiple upstream/downstream service dependencies.
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and hybrid architectures.

• Deep understanding of microservices, event-driven patterns, API gateways, middleware, and message queues.
• Experience designing Observability for complex, globally distributed systems.

• Communicate technical strategy to senior stakeholders.
• Passion for simplifying complex problems through automation.
• Lead initiatives and drive large‑scale adoption.

• Experience implementing templated dashboards, tiles, and standardized visualization frameworks.
• Exposure to cost optimization, data ingestion pipelines, or AI‑driven monitoring approaches.

• 10-15+ years in large‑scale engineering organizations with deep Observability ownership.