JOB TITLE: Senior Observability Engineer – Elastic Stack / Kibana
JOB LOCATION: Sydney, NSW
JOB DURATION: 6-month contract (potential extension)
Role purpose:
The Senior Observability Engineer – Elastic Stack / Kibana will deliver practical application monitoring, observability and DevOps-aligned operational outcomes using logs already available in ELK. The role focuses on Kibana dashboards, KQL-based analysis, alerting, tuning, automation support and operational handover across business-critical systems. This is not primarily a log-ingestion or ELK platform administration role.
Objectives:
- Implement consistent application monitoring and observability capabilities using logs already available in EL.
- Build actionable Kibana dashboards, saved searches, visualisations and drill-down views for agreed use cases.
- Configure, test and tune alerts to support timely triage, response and operational ownership.
Key Responsibilities:
- Analyse application logs already available in ELK and confirm whether fields, identifiers and events support agreed monitoring use cases.
- Translate application, operational and security monitoring requirements into Kibana dashboards, saved searches, filters and investigation views.
- Develop and maintain KQL queries and alert logic for service health, failures, exceptions, transaction outcomes, authentication events and other agreed indicators
- Configure alert rules, thresholds, severity and routing in consultation with application, security and ELK platform teams.
- Test and tune dashboards and alerts, document known limitations, false positives, exclusions and approved thresholds.
- Work with Java application teams to interpret application behaviour and recommend targeted logging improvements where the current data is insufficient.
- Maintain delivery progress, decisions and actions in Jira, and prepare implementation documentation, runbooks and knowledge articles in Confluence.
- Provide knowledge transfer and support transition of completed monitoring capability to accountable operational teams.
Key Deliverables:
- Validated monitoring requirements and log-field mapping for assigned use cases.
- Kibana dashboards, saved searches, KQL queries, visualisations and drill-down views.
- Configured and tested alert rules, thresholds, severity, routing and evidence views.
- Documented tuning decisions, known limitations, operational runbooks and Confluence knowledge articles.
- Knowledge-transfer sessions and handover documentation for application, security and platform support teams.
Skills and Experience:
- Strong experience in observability engineering, application monitoring, log analytics or application security monitoring in enterprise environments.
- Hands-on experience with Kibana dashboards, Lens, filters, controls, drill-downs, saved searches and dashboard usability.
- Practical knowledge of Elasticsearch and ELK concepts, including indices, data views, fields, aggregations and query performance.
- Strong KQL skills for investigation, monitoring and alerting use cases.
- Experience designing and tuning alert thresholds, severity models and false-positive treatment.
- Ability to analyse application logs to identify operational failures, security-relevant events, patterns and root causes.
- Experience with Java application logs, stack traces, logging frameworks and application behaviour.
- DevOps experience, including Linux/Unix, shell scripting, CI/CD awareness, release support, environment validation and automation activities.
- Experience using Jira and Confluence to manage delivery and maintain operational knowledge.
- Strong troubleshooting, written communication, stakeholder engagement and handover skills
Desirable Skills and Experience:
- Experience with Elastic alerting, rule management, connectors and case or incident workflow integration.
- Exposure to Azure Monitor, Microsoft Sentinel, CI/CD tooling, cloud platforms or other SIEM and security operations platforms.
- Understanding of secure logging practices, monitoring control assurance and operational support models.
Please submit your current resume to apply. If you'd like a confidential discussion about the role, please contact Bidisha Swayamprava on Bidisha.Swayamprava@davidsonwp.com, quoting reference JN -102026-44557. To learn more about Davidson, visit davidsonwp.com.
