Platform Engineer - Observability at Era4, United Kingdom, 6 Months initial, £Competitive Day Rate

Era4 develops, owns and operates AI infrastructure across the UK, powered by renewable energy. Converting legacy industrial and energy sites into modern data-centre facilities, Era4 is combining brownfield regeneration opportunities with cleaner, efficient, scalable compute capacity for healthcare, research, finance, enterprise, and public-sector organisations

Initial 6 month contract.

June start date.

Competitive day rate.

Role Summary:

The Identity & Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing and operating the core platform services that provide:

Kubernetes platform services

Sovereign identity management

Federation and authentication services

Privileged access management

Secrets management

Customer identity integration

Platform security and governance

The successful candidate will play a key role in delivering a Zero Trust, sovereign cloud platform built around: FreeIPA, Teleport, authentic, Bitwarden, Kubernetes.

Key Responsibilities:

Observability Platform Implementation:

• Deliver the implementation of Era4's observability platform based on Grafana Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Grafana Alloy and Grafana Enterprise tooling.
• Design and implement highly available observability services across multiple co-location and production sites.
• Configure telemetry ingestion pipelines for metrics, logs, and future distributed tracing workloads.
• Develop and maintain observability architecture documentation, high-level designs, low-level designs, and operational runbooks.
• Define platform standards for telemetry collection, labelling, metadata enrichment, retention policies, and data governance.
• Implement multi-tenant observability controls and tenant isolation strategies.
• Configure and maintain object-storage-backed telemetry platforms for long-term retention and scalability.

Telemetry Collection & Integration:

• Deploy and manage Grafana Alloy collectors across Kubernetes clusters, Linux hosts, network infrastructure, storage platforms, and hardware management systems.
• Integrate telemetry from Kubernetes, GPU infrastructure, HPE hardware, storage platforms, network devices, and cloud-native services.
• Develop and maintain observability integrations using OpenTelemetry standards and protocols.
• Establish onboarding processes for new platforms, applications, and infrastructure services.
• Collaborate with application teams to define observability requirements and future tracing adoption strategies.

Alerting & Operational Insights:

• Design and implement alerting frameworks using recording rules, AlertManager, and operational best practices.
• Develop operational dashboards and service health views for infrastructure, platform, and application services.
• Support integration of observability events with ITSM and incident-management platforms.
• Define SLIs, SLOs, alert thresholds, and operational KPIs.
• Continuously improve platform observability, incident detection, and root-cause analysis capabilities.

Reliability & Automation:

• Implement Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps practices for observability platform deployment and configuration management.
• Develop automation for dashboard provisioning, alert deployment, tenant onboarding, and telemetry configuration.
• Design and validate disaster recovery, resilience, and failover capabilities across observability services.
• Contribute to platform security, compliance, and operational governance initiatives.
• Work with operational teams to ensure observability services remain reliable, scalable, and maintainable.

Required Experience & Skills:

• Significant experience implementing and operating enterprise observability or monitoring platforms.
• Strong understanding of metrics, logs, traces, OpenTelemetry, and modern observability principles.
• Experience with Grafana ecosystem technologies including Grafana, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo, and Grafana Alloy.
• Experience designing Kubernetes-native solutions and operating distributed platforms at scale.
• Knowledge of Linux systems administration and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Experience implementing Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps approaches (preferably including Ansible).
• Skilled in developing automation and operational tooling using Python and/or Go.
• Previous exposure to creating technical architecture, operational documentation, and deployment designs.
• Experience with object storage technologies and distributed data platforms.
• Strong understanding of monitoring, alerting, and operational event management.

One or more of the following would be advantageous:

• Implemented OpenTelemetry-based observability solutions.
• Operated observability platforms in service-provider, cloud, or large-scale enterprise environments.
• Supported GPU, AI/ML, or high-performance computing environments.
• Integrated observability platforms with ITSM solutions.
• Experience with multi-tenant platform architectures.
• Knowledge of networking, storage, and data-centre infrastructure monitoring.
• Understanding of distributed tracing and application performance monitoring.

Why Join Era4:

You’ll be joining a mission-driven start-up building critical national infrastructure, where operational excellence directly enables growth. This role offers high visibility with leadership, real autonomy, and the chance to shape how a next-generation company operates at scale.

Diversity & Inclusion:

Era4 is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.