Observability & Automation Engineer

CIC Insurance Group Plc is a leading Kenyan insurance and financial services provider, established in 1968 and headquartered in Nairobi. The company offers a wide range of insurance products and financial solutions.

The Observability & Automation Engineer will play a crucial role in the Technology Reliability Department, reporting directly to the DevOps Manager. This position involves the comprehensive design, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of enterprise-level monitoring, observability, and automation solutions. The primary objective is to guarantee the high availability, optimal performance, robust security, and overall reliability of the company's core systems and various communication channels. Key aspects of this role include proactively identifying potential incidents, enhancing system visibility across the infrastructure, improving operational efficiency through streamlined processes, and automating repetitive operational tasks to reduce manual effort and potential errors.

1. Design and manage enterprise observability and monitoring platforms.
2. Implement comprehensive monitoring for infrastructure, applications, databases, networks, logs, and digital user experiences.
3. Develop insightful dashboards, alerts, Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for critical services.
4. Establish end-to-end transaction monitoring across all operational channels.
5. Improve alert accuracy and actively work to reduce false positives and alert fatigue.
6. Identify and automate repetitive operational processes to enhance efficiency.
7. Develop and maintain automation scripts, workflows, and self-healing solutions.
8. Automate health checks, incident response procedures, server provisioning, configuration management, compliance reporting, and routine maintenance tasks.
9. Create detailed runbooks and automated operational procedures.
10. Handle incident management processes and drive operational excellence initiatives.
11. Manage and optimize observability tools, including Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, ELK, Prometheus, and Grafana.
12. Integrate monitoring platforms seamlessly with ITSM tools.
13. Collaborate closely with Information Security teams to enhance threat detection and support security monitoring efforts.
14. Partner with application, infrastructure, architecture, and support teams to foster a collaborative environment.
15. Drive observability maturity and promote reliability best practices throughout the organization.

1. Hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
2. Possess 3-4 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Monitoring, and Observability.
3. Have proven experience with enterprise observability and monitoring platforms.
4. Demonstrate strong scripting skills in languages such as Python, Bash, or Ansible.
5. Possess experience with Kubernetes, Linux, and VMware environments.
6. Exhibit a deep understanding of API monitoring and Network Monitoring principles.
7. Show a proactive approach to identifying problems, areas for improvement, and performance bottlenecks.
8. Certifications in SRE/DevOps will be considered an added advantage.
9. Key competencies include Automation Design, Observability and Monitoring, Reliability Engineering, Decision Making, Communication and Executive Reporting, and a Continuous Improvement Mindset.