Platform Engineer: Observability and Insights

Platform Engineer on Team Observability and Insights

Team Observability and Insights is responsible for providing a fast, reliable, secure and highly available observability platform for the application and infrastructure teams within bol.

Your core customers aren’t our millions of shoppers. They’re our on-call engineers debugging a production issue at 2am, teams trying to understand why their service dramatically degraded during peak traffic, and developers who need their alerting pipeline to just work. Team Observability and Insights provides the logging, tracing, and metrics infrastructure that keeps bol’s 700+ tech professionals in control of their applications. When your platform is solid, 13.7 million customers never notice your outstanding work. And that’s exactly the goal.

What you’ll do as a Platform Engineer on Team Observability and Insights

You’ll join a diverse team of platform engineers working alongside a dedicated Lead Engineer, and in partnership with Engineering and Product managers. The Observability and Insights team is responsible for providing a company-wide observability platform that has three primary components: logging, tracing, and metrics. In practice, that entails every pipeline that ingests, transforms, indexes, and surfaces data for application teams across bol, including third-party tooling for external monitoring and Incident Response Management (IRM).

Your work spans these three interconnected areas. You build and maintain developer-facing observability tooling, including dashboards, query interfaces, and alerting rules that align with how application teams work. You partner with those teams directly to understand their debugging and monitoring workflows, then translate those insights into intuitive query and visualization tools that reduce friction and MTTR. You also participate in architectural discussions around scalability, resilience, and cost, with a focus on query performance, data retention policies, and self-service dashboard design. Finally, you take one-week turns as the daytime first responder for platform-level incidents and internal questions.

Key responsibilities include:

• Build and maintain developer-facing observability tooling (dashboards, query interfaces, alerting rules) that aligns with application team workflows
• Identify, design, operate, and improve the observability ecosystem in partnership with application teams
• Optimize log, metric, and tracing pipelines for developer usability, reducing MTTR and query friction
• Collaborate on tooling architecture with a focus on query performance, data retention, and self-service dashboard design
• Participate in the daytime on-call rotation; respond to platform-level incidents and internal support requests

Technical stack: GCP / GKE, Grafana / Loki / LogQL, Prometheus & Thanos / PromQL, Elasticsearch / Kibana, Kubernetes, Linux (RedHat, Debian-based), Python / Go, OpenTelemetry

Why you can make a difference

You combine extensive hands-on experience with the observability toolchain with a drive to improve the developer experience. You know what it means to operate at scale, so your designs account for failovers, high usage, and cost efficiency. You’re equally motivated to make the existing infrastructure more useful as you are to build new solutions from scratch. You can incorporate new ideas into proven stacks without breaking them. You’re comfortable in a mature ecosystem and energized by the challenge of making complex tooling feel effortless to the engineers who depend on it.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

Not your ideal role if:

• Greenfield or bust: The observability stack is mature, and most of the work is refinement, optimization, and extension.
• Backend purist: You want to zoom in on infrastructure, full stop. The expectation here is close collaboration with application teams. In fact, understanding their workflows is half of the job, and what makes the other half possible.
• Han Solo: That’s your role model. You keep colleagues at lightsaber’s distance.

You’ll likely thrive if:

• Scale-aware builder: Designing for hundreds of teams across a high-demand platform is your kind of challenge. You ship to production and know what it takes to get that right.
• Ecosystem integrator: You know how to improve and extend solutions. New ideas land better when they play nice with the existing stack.
• Developer experience obsessive: When the tooling works, engineers barely notice it. That invisibility is what you’re aiming for.

Here’s where you’ll land

You’ll join Team Observability and Insights within bol’s broader platform engineering organization. The team is diverse, the roadmap is shaped in direct collaboration with internal customers, and the work has a tangible impact. When the observability platform performs ‘as advertised,’ hundreds of engineering teams can move faster and recover quicker. With 2,900 colleagues building for 13.7 million customers and 47,000 partners, your solutions are the bedrock on which everything else is built.

Perks of having a blue heart

The culture and the office

Our colleagues work hard to make the daily lives of our customers easier and more fun. But of course, we do this in an inspiring and creative environment!

On and off

At bol we understand like no other that you have to take care of yourself first, then your environment and then bol. In that order. Therefore, everyone at bol receives 29 days of vacation.

Flexible working

We bring the best of both worlds together by working 50% at the office and 50% at home. This way, we find a balance between organisational and individual needs.