Platform Engineer - Observability & Insights

Power the platform that keeps 900+ engineers flying

How do you make our customers happy?

By ensuring 13.7 million customers and 47,000 partners never experience the frustration of a (preventable) broken service. As a Platform Engineer on Team Observability & Insights, you’ll build and maintain an observability platform that lets 900+ engineers see what’s happening with their apps. Your logging, metrics, and tracing transform countless data points into actionable insights, enabling teams to troubleshoot issues faster and more efficiently. When an engineer can quickly trace a customer’s failed transaction or spot a performance bottleneck before it impacts users, it’s because you made that possible.

The biggest challenge

Operating at a scale where “good enough” needs to mean flawless. Your platforms must ingest and process huge numbers of logs and metrics while remaining performant. How can you balance the need for observability with cost constraints? How can you make tools so intuitive that on-call engineers can diagnose problems autonomously at 3 AM? You’ll need to build an observability platform that is fast, robust, and scalable. High demand, high load, high expectations. 😉

What you'll do as a Platform Engineer - Observability & Insights

You’ll join a team of seven – five platform engineers, one product manager, and one engineering manager – who collectively ensure bol’s technical excellence through superior observability. Working with “freedom within a framework,” your team owns critical infrastructure built on ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for logging and Grafana/Prometheus for metrics, all running on GKE clusters.

Your mission spans the entire observability ecosystem. You’ll build data pipelines that ingest, transform, and index massive volumes of logs and traces. You’ll optimize Prometheus and Thanos deployments to handle metrics at scale while keeping costs under control. Beyond maintaining existing systems, you’ll identify opportunities to enhance the developer experience – for example, by implementing distributed tracing to help teams debug microservices. You’ll participate in the on-call rotation and be the expert that other engineers turn to when their monitoring fails. But more importantly, you’ll build systems so reliable that late-night pages become a thing of the past. As such, your work directly impacts how quickly teams can ship features, how fast they can resolve incidents, and ultimately, how happy our customers are.

Key responsibilities:

• Join us on our mission to identify and support the needs of bol’s engineers
• Develop, improve, and optimize our logging and metrics platforms
• Participate in the architecture and solution-making process
• Join our on-call rotation to help troubleshoot issues and answer questions
• Design and optimize logging platforms that handle terabytes of data
• Build and maintain a metrics infrastructure using Prometheus, Thanos, and Grafana
• Create data pipelines that transform raw logs into actionable insights
• Collaborate with teams to understand and solve observability challenges
• Drive adoption through documentation, workshops, and tooling improvements

Why you can make a difference

You combine deep technical expertise with a passion for enabling fellow engineers. With hands-on experience in cloud platforms (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure welcome), you understand how to build systems that scale. Your Prometheus and Elasticsearch knowledge isn’t just theoretical – you’ve debugged failures and optimized query performance under pressure before. Python and Linux are your favorite automation and troubleshooting companions. You understand that the best observability platform is one that engineers actually want to use, not one they’re forced to adopt. Your solutions balance technical excellence with practical usability, always keeping the on-call engineer’s experience in mind. Kubernetes expertise helps you build cloud-native solutions, while your automation mindset ensures repetitive tasks disappear.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

• Greenfield dweller You want to build everything from scratch rather than improve mature, battle-tested systems
• ENGINEER You spell engineer in all caps. Supporting other teams and answering questions feels like a distraction from "real" engineering
• Complexity avoider Predictability, data privacy, and security processes feel like unnecessary bureaucracy
• Scale enthusiast Building platforms that process countless events is fun; high-load, high-demand environments are where you thrive
• Reliability champion You understand that excellent platforms need both innovation and rock-solid stability, mixing new ideas with proven tools
• Developer experience advocate Creating tools that cascade positive effects motivates you; happy engineers mean happy customers

Where you'll work

You’ll join Team Observability & Insights at one of the leading retail tech platforms in the Netherlands and Belgium. Our team has built strong bonds based on technical excellence and shared laughter. With the freedom to make consequential decisions about priorities, technologies, and solutions, you’ll shape how observability evolves at bol. Working in an environment where 2,900 colleagues serve 13.7 million customers, the scale of your impact is immediately visible. Every improvement you make ripples through the organization, helping teams to ship faster and sleep better. We’re rightfully proud of how our mature tech stack handles huge data volumes – this is your chance to work with production systems that truly push boundaries. Ready to build the observability platform that keeps bol flying? Show us how you’ll turn data floods into insights!

We take pride in our B Corp certification and strive for continuous improvement every day. Our annual bonus is tied to sustainability goals.

vperezdilsizian@bol.com