Global Observability Team Lead

WHO WE ARE

Optiver is a global market maker founded in Amsterdam, with offices in London, Chicago, Austin, New York, Sydney, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei and Mumbai. Established in 1986, today we are a leading liquidity provider, with close to 2,000 employees in offices around the world, united in our commitment to improve the market through competitive pricing, execution and risk management. By providing liquidity on multiple exchanges across the world in various financial instruments we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets. We provide liquidity to financial markets using our own capital, at our own risk, trading a wide range of products: listed derivatives, cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign currencies.

Optiver’s Sydney office is one of the primary players within Asian markets, trading a range of products. Established in 1996, we're an active participant on the Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan exchanges, and act as Optiver’s APAC head office.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

Optiver is advancing the next growth phase of our global observability capability. This role is part of the Production Platform & Operations team and reports to the Head of Production Platform.

At Optiver, observability has evolved over years across multiple teams and platforms. We have a solid foundation in logs, metrics, and telemetry pipelines. We recently formed a dedicated team to build and advance observability as a standalone platform. We seek someone with leadership capability, technical expertise and drive to evolve this function long-term, delivering a resilient, scalable observability platform across a globally distributed trading environment.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will not be expected to be the primary implementer of every system, but you will need enough depth to challenge designs, guide architectural trade-offs, unblock engineers, and make high-quality technical decisions. You will lead a distributed team across regions and define the operating model, strategy, and architecture. Your goal is to transform observability into a globally consistent, regionally federated, business-critical platform capability. Your work will directly improve the speed and quality of production diagnosis, reduce operational risk, and increase confidence in the systems that support Optiver’s global trading environment.

Key responsibilities include:

• Own the global observability platform strategy, architecture, adoption, and delivery roadmap, guiding the team to make and execute high-quality technical decisions.

• Lead, coach, and develop a globally distributed team of SREs and software engineers, shaping future team design as the function evolves.

• Develop a globally consistent, regionally federated operating model that enables regions to operate independently while aligning on shared standards, tools, and practices.

• Improve instrumentation quality across engineering teams to ensure telemetry is consistent, actionable, and useful in production.

• Enhance developer quality of life by simplifying observability adoption, use, and effectiveness for diagnosis and debugging.

• Expand observability coverage to adjacent platforms such as developer tooling, research, data platforms, and other engineering domains over time.

• Partner with engineering, infrastructure, trading, research, and regional operations teams to drive adoption of observability standards, tooling, and instrumentation practices.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

• Proven ability to lead engineers, shape team structure, manage execution, and deliver platform outcomes in a complex technical environment.

• Experience designing or leading large-scale observability platforms, including ingest pipelines, telemetry storage, query performance, reliability, resilience, and scale-related trade-offs.

• Strong technical understanding of modern observability practices across logs, metrics, traces, alerting, dashboards, diagnostics, and instrumentation quality.

• Ability to set standards, guide technical direction, and ensure consistency across teams, functions, and regions.

• Strong delivery mindset with the ability to set direction, structure execution, and meet strategic commitments.

Strong preference will be given to candidates with:

• Experience leading observability in hyperscaler, SaaS, trading, exchange, or other large-scale distributed systems environments.

• Experience with platforms using Kafka-backed pipelines, Grafana, ELK, ClickHouse, VictoriaMetrics, InfluxDB, Telegraf, Vector, and custom telemetry collectors.

• Experience leading global engineering teams and defining operating models that balance global strategy with regional execution.