Operations Specialist

About the Role:

OEC is in the middle of a multi-year journey to modernise its infrastructure and applications, transforming how we build, deploy, and operate software at global scale. The Operations Specialist (L2) is a core member of the Monitoring Team within the Enterprise Operations Team, responsible for the configuration, maintenance, and continuous improvement of OEC’s observability stack, primarily powered by Datadog.

Key Responsibilities & Duties (essential to the job)

Monitoring & alerting

• Design, configure, and maintain Datadog monitors, composite alerts, and notification channels for production and non-production environments.
• Own the L2 alert triage process — investigate, diagnose, and resolve escalated alerts from L1, ensuring timely root cause identification.
• Tune alert thresholds and suppression rules to minimise noise and reduce false positive rates.
• Manage SLO (Service Level Objective) definitions, tracking, and reporting across assigned services.
• Participate in the on-call rotation for critical monitoring alerts and P1/P2 incident response.

Dashboards & observability

• Build and maintain Datadog dashboards covering infrastructure health, application performance, log analytics, and business KPIs.
• Configure and manage Datadog APM (Application Performance Monitoring), distributed tracing, and error tracking for key services.
• Implement and manage log ingestion pipelines, parsing rules, and log-based monitors.
• Develop and maintain Synthetic monitors (API and browser tests) for uptime and user experience validation.

Service onboarding & integrations

• Onboard new services and infrastructure components into the Datadog monitoring framework in collaboration with DevOps, Cloud, and Engineering teams.
• Configure and maintain Datadog integrations with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Rackspace), Kubernetes, containerised workloads, and third-party tools.
• Support the migration of legacy monitoring tooling (SCOM, Dynatrace, Grafana, Prometheus, Pingdom, Apigee, Redgate, IDERA) into Datadog.

Incident response & runbooks

• Act as L2 escalation point during incidents — perform deep-dive investigations using metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards.
• Create, maintain, and improve runbooks for common alert scenarios, incident response procedures, and post-incident remediation steps.
• Contribute to post-incident reviews, documenting root cause findings and identifying monitoring gaps to prevent recurrence.
• Alerts system owners, stakeholders, and management of degraded system status and Priority 1 and Priority 2 incidents; issues tickets for incident and problem escalation.

AI & automation

• Leverage Datadog AI capabilities including Watchdog, anomaly detection, outlier detection, and Bits AI to improve proactive issue detection.
• Implement forecast-based monitors for capacity management (CPU, memory, disk).
• Use AI-based alert correlation and deduplication features to reduce alert fatigue.
• Contribute to automation of repetitive monitoring tasks using Datadog’s API and scripting tools.

Standards & governance

• Adhere to and actively contribute to monitoring standards, tagging strategies, and naming conventions.
• Participate in regular alert quality reviews, dashboard audits, and SLO compliance checks.
• Maintain accurate documentation of monitoring configurations, integrations, and architectural decisions.
• Creates and maintains knowledge articles to be used internally and/or externally for training, best practices, solutions, or processes relating to applications, environments, and related technologies.

Infrastructure operations & support

• Analyses and troubleshoots Microsoft and UNIX/Linux server configurations and processes.
• Performs moderately complex database administration.
• Monitors data centre networks, infrastructure bandwidth, application health, servers, and other infrastructure; coordinates and communicates with vendors.
• Diagnoses and researches (using knowledge base) application incidents, monitoring alerts, and service requests; provides assistance and guidance to associate operations specialists.
• Adheres to all incident and service request processes and procedures in accordance with established Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Diagnoses, researches, and resolves Level-2 technical hardware and software incidents, monitoring alerts, and service requests.
• Works on ad-hoc projects to support Infrastructure Engineering or other departments, as requested.
• Demonstrates a flexible and adaptable approach to work and adjusts to shifts in priorities as the needs of the business change.
• Collaborates with DevOps, Cloud, and application teams to align monitoring coverage with service requirements.