Staff Engineer - Cloud & Observability

Job description

Company Description Job Description As Staff Engineer – Cloud & Observability, you will help shape the technical foundation that enables engineering teams across Rituals to build, scale and operate with confidence. You will be part of our Technology Platforms organisation, where we create resilient, secure and easy-to-use platform capabilities. Rituals is a fast-growing global company, expected to continue significant expansion in the coming years. This growth requires strong, scalable and standardised cloud and observability platforms that enable teams to deliver reliably at increasing scale. In this role, you will define the technical vision and long-term roadmap for our Google Cloud foundation and enterprise observability capabilities. Your scope includes cloud landing zones, identity and access management, networking, policy frameworks, security controls and a new observability platform based on OpenTelemetry standards. This is a strategic role at the heart of our shift from a project organisation to a product operating model. You will work closely with other platform teams, product teams, and senior stakeholders. By combining technical leadership and platform thinking, you will help create reusable platform capabilities that improve reliability, security and developer experience for product teams across Rituals, enabling faster delivery and accelerating time-to-value. In this role, you will: Define the technical vision and long-term technical roadmap for our GCP cloud foundation and enterprise observability platform, in close partnership with the Product Owner and Head of Technology Platforms. Design and evolve core cloud platform capabilities such as landing zones, identity and access management, networking, security controls and policy frameworks, ensuring a secure, scalable and standardised foundation for engineering teams across Rituals. Lead the design and implementation of a new enterprise observability platform based on OpenTelemetry standards, enabling end-to-end visibility across logs, metrics and traces. Build self-service platform capabilities and paved roads, including infrastructure modules, templates and abstractions that help teams deliver independently, consistently and with less operational complexity. Establish and evolve platform standards, guardrails and governance models covering architecture, security, compliance and FinOps, ensuring alignment and cost-effective usage across the organisation. Influence architectural direction across the organisation, using RFCs and ADRs to enable clear, scalable and well-governed technical decision-making. Mentor and guide engineers across teams and work closely with stakeholders across Technology Platforms, product teams and leadership to improve platform adoption and developer experience. Qualifications We are looking for someone who combines deep technical expertise with an enabling leadership style. You know how to build platforms that are secure, scalable and reliable, while also ensuring they are intuitive to adopt. You bring a platform-as-a-product mindset and care about creating capabilities that genuinely help teams move faster and better. You are comfortable in a changing environment, where new capabilities are being built and legacy workloads are being migrated. You can connect long-term technical strategy with practical decisions and bring others along through clarity, collaboration and sound judgement. Just as importantly, you enjoy mentoring others and improving platforms through real feedback and use cases. To be successful in this role, you bring Extensive experience in cloud engineering, SRE, infrastructure or platform design, including several years in senior technical or architectural roles with broad organisational influence. Deep expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and hands-on experience designing and operating enterprise-grade cloud foundations with a focus on scalability, automation, self-service, and reliability. Strong experience with platform engineering, including building internal developer platforms, paved roads and infrastructure-as-code (IAS) solutions, for example with Terraform, OpenTofu, Crossplane or Pulumi, combined with CI/CD and policy-as-code practices. Solid experience in secure platform engineering, including identity and access management (e.g. CPAM), secure-by-design patterns, enterprise networking and security controls, and familiarity with governance and cloud security posture (CSPM) topics. Deep knowledge of observability and OpenTelemetry, with experience designing and implementing enterprise observability capabilities across logs, metrics and traces at scale. The ability to translate technical complexity into clear direction, decisions and mentoring for teams, contributing to a culture of reliability, scalability and continuous improvement. Additional Information At Rituals, we are committed to care for everyone and strive to create a diverse workplace where all employees belong and have equal opportunities to succeed. Read more about our commitment here https://careers.rituals.com/en-NL/work-with-heart-and-soul/diversity-and-inclusion/ Location and Working Conditions At Rituals, we believe in the power of connection: with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. That is why we work 80% from the office (typically four days per week) and 20% from home. Together, we bring our brand philosophy to life by transforming everyday routines into meaningful moments. Our Benefits Working at Rituals means being part of a fast-growing, international environment, while staying grounded in what matters: people, wellbeing and meaningful work. Competitive salary package Bonus opportunity Pension plan Commuting allowance Learning and development opportunities (training, internal growth, mentorship) Employee discount on Rituals products Wellbeing support initiatives The Next Steps Our process is designed to be thorough and transparent, so we can both make a confident choice. Our recruiter will contact you within 10 working days Intro call with the recruiter to discuss your application and mutual fit An interview with the business to learn more about the role and assess your experience A second interview including a case study An online assessment (cognitive ability plus personality questionnaire) If the outcome is positive, you’ll receive an offer to join our team