Senior Data Pipeline Engineer

Senior Data Pipeline Engineer

Location: Hybrid – based from either our Brighton or London office, with travel to UK client sites as required

Salary: £70,000–£80,000 base

Role type: Full-time, permanent

Department: Technology Consulting – Observability Practice

Role Overview

NETbuilder is building an Observability Practice, and this is a senior delivery hire into it.

As a Senior Data Pipeline Engineer, you will work hands-on with enterprise clients to architect, deploy and operate the observability platforms and telemetry data pipelines that power modern observability.

You will work extensively with technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace OpenPipeline, Bindplane, Cribl, Elastic and Splunk, helping enterprise organisations collect, transform and route logs, metrics and traces reliably, efficiently and at scale.

You will be responsible for both the observability platform itself and the telemetry pipelines that collect, transform, enrich and route operational data across complex enterprise environments.

This is a hybrid role, based from either our Brighton or London office, with travel to UK client sites as required depending on project needs.

This is primarily a senior individual contributor position rather than a permanent people-management role. You'll remain hands-on while providing technical leadership on client engagements—mentoring engineers, planning workstreams and acting as the senior technical authority for observability platforms and telemetry pipelines.

Previous consulting or professional services experience is beneficial but not essential. What matters most is strong, current, hands-on experience designing observability platforms and building telemetry data pipelines within complex enterprise environments.

If you enjoy solving challenging engineering problems, designing scalable observability architectures and leading through technical expertise, this is the role for you.

Key Responsibilities

Pipeline Engineering & Delivery

• Design, build and operate telemetry pipelines that collect, route, transform, enrich, reduce and mask logs, metrics and traces at enterprise scale
• Develop and maintain data transformation logic – parsing, restructuring, filtering and normalising telemetry across formats and schemas
• Optimise pipelines for data quality, cost control and performance – reducing noise and volume without losing signal
• Onboard complex applications and data sources onto observability platforms
• Build, test and document reusable pipeline configurations, processors and templates
• Monitor pipeline health and throughput, and troubleshoot ingestion, routing and delivery issues

Platform Architecture & Deployment

• Architect observability platform deployments – topology, sizing, high availability, resilience and scaling – to meet enterprise client requirements
• Deploy, configure and operate observability platforms and their collection/agent fleets across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments
• Define deployment patterns and infrastructure-as-code for repeatable, automated platform rollouts
• Integrate observability platforms with client infrastructure, data sources and downstream destinations
• Own platform health, upgrades and capacity planning, and keep architecture and deployment documentation current

Client Delivery

• Deliver observability platform and pipeline engagements directly with enterprise clients as a senior practitioner
• Own delivery outcomes for the platform and pipeline workstreams on assigned engagements
• Act as senior technical authority and escalation point for platform architecture, deployment and data pipeline issues
• Lead troubleshooting and root-cause analysis across enterprise observability platforms and telemetry pipelines
• Support pre-sales with technical scoping and solution design for platform and pipeline work
• Translate client requirements into platform and pipeline designs that balance coverage, cost and compliance

Engagement Leadership & Mentoring

This is engagement-scoped technical leadership rather than permanent line management – on specific engagements you will:

• Provide technical leadership as the senior practitioner, setting direction and quality standards for the platform and pipeline workstream
• Plan the workstream – scope the work, sequence the tasks and allocate them across the engagement delivery team where required
• Mentor and coach junior engineers and consultants working alongside you, sharing platform and pipeline expertise on the job
• Co-ordinate with the wider engagement team and report progress on the workstream

Tooling & Practice Contribution

• Work hands-on across the observability tool landscape (see preferred tools below), applying each platform's architecture, deployment and data-pipelining capabilities
• Stay current with platform capabilities, roadmaps and certifications
• Contribute to NETbuilder's platform and pipeline methodology, toolkits and reusable assets

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Senior data pipeline engineering experience: demonstrable hands-on track record designing, building and operating telemetry/observability data pipelines at enterprise scale
• Platform architecture and deployment experience: hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating observability platforms (topology, sizing, high availability and scaling) across cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments
• Data transformation expertise: strong practical experience with parsing, routing, filtering, enrichment and normalisation of log, metric and trace data
• Tooling experience: hands-on experience with the architecture, deployment and data-pipelining functionality of one or more industry-standard observability platforms (see preferred tools below)
• Engagement leadership: comfortable mentoring junior engineers and planning and allocating tasks within a delivery team on an engagement, without formal line-management authority
• Consulting experience: preferred but not essential – comfortable working directly within enterprise client teams

Preferred Tool Experience

Hands-on experience with the architecture, deployment and data-pipelining functionality of one or more of the following platforms, in order of preference:

• Bindplane (ObservIQ / Google)
• Dynatrace (OpenPipeline)
• OpenTelemetry (Collector – receivers, processors and exporters)
• Cribl (Stream)
• Elastic (ingest pipelines)
• Splunk

Preferred Certifications

Certification in one or more of the following is preferred:

• Dynatrace Professional (Dynatrace Master advantageous)
• OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) – also covers Bindplane, which is OpenTelemetry-native
• Cribl Certified Engineer (CC Engineer) or Cribl Certified Observability Engineer – Admin (CCOE Admin)
• Elastic Certified Engineer
• Splunk Enterprise Certified Architect

Key Skills

• Platform architecture and deployment: designing observability platform topology (sizing, HA, scaling) and deploying/automating platform and pipeline infrastructure as code
• Pipeline and transformation tooling: deep expertise in one or more observability platforms and their transformation languages and processors
• OpenTelemetry: strong working knowledge of the OpenTelemetry Collector (receivers, processors, exporters) and OTLP
• Scripting and automation: Python, Bash
• Data formats and parsing: JSON, regex, syslog, and common log, metric and trace formats
• Cloud platform knowledge: AWS, Azure, and/or GCP
• Container and orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift
• Familiar with delivery and project tooling: JIRA, Confluence, ServiceNow

About You

• A hands-on engineer who would rather architect and build a solution than sit in a management meeting
• Happy to lead through expertise – mentoring others, planning a workstream and giving direction on an engagement, even without a formal management title
• Comfortable working directly with enterprise client teams and engaging senior stakeholders in a hybrid role, based from either our Brighton or London office with travel to UK client sites as required.
• Rigorous about data quality, cost and reliability – you care about getting the right signal at the right price
• Self-managing, delivery-focused and comfortable in a fast-moving environment
• Naturally curious – you keep pace with a fast-evolving observability tooling landscape

About NETbuilder

NETbuilder is a leading provider of digital solutions, consulting, software engineering and managed services. We deliver complex technology solutions across financial services, government and commercial markets.

Since 1999, we've helped organisations deliver digital transformation through specialist expertise in software development, consulting and technology delivery.

You'll join an experienced team of consultants and play a key role in building NETbuilder's new Observability Practice from the ground up.

Why NETbuilder

• Join a brand-new Observability Practice and help shape its technical direction.
• Work hands-on with modern observability platforms including OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace, Bindplane, Cribl, Elastic and Splunk.
• Deliver enterprise-scale observability solutions across a variety of industries.
• Competitive base salary of £70,000–£80,000.
• Ongoing investment in professional development and certifications.
• High-performing, collaborative engineering culture where technical expertise is recognised.
• Hybrid working from either our Brighton or London office, with travel to UK client sites as required.