Principal Engineer - Observability

Principal Observability Engineer

Drive enterprise observability strategy, platform modernization, telemetry governance, and AIOps innovation by designing large-scale monitoring ecosystems, implementing OpenTelemetry standards, and enabling intelligent incident response across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments.

Opportunity to be one of our first team members in Woolworths Group India in Bangalore.

Woolworths Group India is partnering exclusively with Zinnov Group to recruit for this position.

About this Role

As a Principal Observability Engineer, you will serve as the technical authority for enterprise observability practices across Woolworths Group. You will be responsible for defining the strategic vision, architecture, adoption roadmap, and operational excellence of observability platforms supporting critical business systems.

Working closely with Product Management, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Platform Engineering, IT Operations, and Service Management teams, you will lead the evolution of enterprise telemetry capabilities spanning metrics, logs, traces, events, APM, synthetic monitoring, and AIOps.

You will play a pivotal role in standardizing observability practices, driving OpenTelemetry adoption, building scalable telemetry platforms, integrating incident management ecosystems, and enabling proactive operations through automation and AI-driven insights.

What You'll Do

Observability Platform Architecture & Scaling

Design, architect, and scale enterprise observability platforms capable of managing multi-terabyte telemetry workloads. Build resilient, cost-effective, and future-ready monitoring architectures across distributed environments.

OpenTelemetry & Telemetry Engineering

Establish enterprise standards for logs, metrics, traces, and events through OpenTelemetry (OTel). Drive vendor-agnostic telemetry collection and enable consistent observability practices across applications and infrastructure.

AIOps & Intelligent Incident Management

Design and implement AIOps frameworks that leverage event correlation, noise reduction, anomaly detection, and automated remediation to improve operational efficiency and reduce incident response times.

Monitoring & Distributed Systems Visibility

Build comprehensive visibility across applications, microservices, Kubernetes platforms, cloud environments, and enterprise infrastructure using modern monitoring and tracing technologies.

Ecosystem Integration & Automation

Integrate observability platforms with ServiceNow ITOM, PagerDuty, CMDBs, and automation platforms to enable intelligent event routing, automated workflows, and self-healing infrastructure.

SRE & Reliability Engineering Enablement

Partner with engineering teams to embed observability into application development lifecycles, CI/CD pipelines, and reliability engineering practices through SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets.

Governance & Platform Standards

Develop telemetry governance frameworks, observability guardrails, data ownership standards, and compliance controls ensuring consistency across enterprise environments.

Cost Optimization & Data Lifecycle Management

Implement telemetry sampling, retention, archiving, and storage optimization strategies to control platform costs while maintaining high-value operational insights.

Technical Leadership & Mentoring

Provide technical guidance and mentorship to observability engineers, SREs, platform engineers, and operations teams. Promote engineering excellence through reusable frameworks, training, and best practices.

Innovation & Emerging Technologies

Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies including eBPF instrumentation, AI-powered observability, GenAI-assisted operations, and next-generation telemetry platforms.

What You'll Bring

Observability & Monitoring Expertise

Deep expertise in enterprise observability platforms including metrics, logs, traces, events, distributed monitoring, telemetry architecture, and monitoring strategy.

OpenTelemetry Leadership

Hands-on experience implementing OpenTelemetry collectors, instrumentation frameworks, telemetry standards, distributed tracing, and vendor-neutral observability architectures.

AIOps & Event Correlation

Strong experience implementing intelligent event management through AIOps platforms, automated incident orchestration, alert correlation, and operational noise reduction.

Cloud & Platform Engineering

Experience monitoring large-scale workloads across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, containers, hybrid cloud, and service mesh ecosystems.

Distributed Systems Monitoring

Strong expertise with Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Real User Monitoring (RUM), Synthetic Monitoring, Distributed Tracing, Waterfall Analysis, and Microservices Observability.

Infrastructure as Code & Automation

Hands-on experience building observability solutions using Infrastructure as Code and automated deployment pipelines.

Programming & Development

Strong scripting and software development experience using Python, Go, Bash, Node.js, or equivalent technologies.

Data Analytics & Platform Optimization

Experience working with telemetry query languages, search platforms, observability analytics engines, and large-scale telemetry datasets.

Governance & Security

Understanding of data privacy, PII protection, telemetry governance, compliance controls, data retention policies, and licensing optimization.

Leadership & Influence

Ability to influence architecture decisions, build engineering standards, mentor teams, and drive enterprise-wide technology adoption programs.

Career Experience

• 8+ years of experience in Systems Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Enterprise Operations.
• 3+ years in a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Lead Engineer, or Architecture role driving enterprise-wide initiatives.
• Proven experience designing and implementing observability solutions at enterprise scale.
• Demonstrated expertise in telemetry engineering, platform modernization, monitoring strategy, and operational transformation.
• Strong experience collaborating with executive stakeholders, platform teams, and engineering organizations.
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Certifications

• Dynatrace Professional / Associate Certification
• Splunk Core Certified Power User / Admin
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
• Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
• Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• HashiCorp Terraform Associate
• ITIL v4 Foundation
• ServiceNow ITOM Certification

What You'll Experience

1. Be part of Australia's largest retailer and help shape enterprise observability capabilities within Woolworths Group.
2. Lead large-scale observability transformation initiatives spanning cloud, hybrid, and enterprise environments.
3. Drive adoption of OpenTelemetry and modern observability standards across the organization.
4. Collaborate with SRE, Platform Engineering, Operations, and Architecture teams across India and Australia.
5. Influence strategic investment decisions involving monitoring, telemetry, and AIOps platforms.
6. Work on advanced event intelligence, automated remediation, and future-state AIOps capabilities.
7. Build scalable self-service observability solutions that improve developer productivity and operational resilience.
8. Mentor engineers and establish observability engineering best practices across teams.
9. Enjoy a flexible and collaborative working environment.

Key Technologies

Observability Platforms

• Dynatrace
• Splunk Observability Cloud
• Splunk Enterprise
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• ELK Stack
• TICK Stack

Telemetry & Monitoring

• OpenTelemetry (OTel)
• Distributed Tracing
• Metrics Collection
• Log Aggregation
• APM
• RUM
• Synthetic Monitoring
• eBPF

AIOps & Incident Management

• ServiceNow ITOM
• ServiceNow Event Management
• PagerDuty
• Global Event Orchestration
• Event Correlation
• Noise Reduction
• Automated Remediation

Cloud & Container Platforms

• AWS
• Azure
• GCP
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• Service Mesh

Infrastructure Automation

• Terraform
• Ansible
• GitHub Actions
• GitLab CI
• Jenkins

Programming & Scripting

• Python
• Go
• Bash
• Node.js

Data & Query Technologies

• SPL
• PromQL
• KQL
• LogScale
• BigQuery
• Elasticsearch

Everyone belongs at Woolworths Group

Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are key to realizing our purpose of better together for a better tomorrow. We recognize the value diverse perspectives bring to our business, customers, and communities. By building inclusive teams with varied experiences and backgrounds, we foster innovation, creativity, and better outcomes for everyone.

We encourage applications from all backgrounds and are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where every team member feels valued, respected, and empowered to achieve their full potential.

Your Personal Data

By submitting your application, you acknowledge and consent to Zinnov Management Consulting Private Limited and its subsidiaries (Zinnov) and/or Woolworths Group Limited and its subsidiaries (Woolworths Group) collecting, processing and disclosing your personal information, including any sensitive personal information provided by you, for the purposes of managing the recruitment process, assessing your suitability for employment, communicating with you regarding your application, and, where appropriate, considering you for future employment opportunities, to the extent relevant.

If your application is successful, Zinnov and/or Woolworths Group will also use your personal information, including sensitive personal information, for managing your ongoing working relationship.

Your personal information will be handled in accordance with applicable privacy laws.

To learn more about how we collect, use, disclose and safeguard your personal information, including your privacy rights, please refer to the Zinnov Privacy Policy and Woolworths Group Team Member Privacy Notice.