Engineering Manager Observability

As an observability leader you coach your colleague engineers towards our new tech organization. You really know how to empower people through major technical changes at NN. As a result we optimally serve our customers.

What you are going to do
NN is changing to an innovative product-oriented company. Our goal is to build technological products and services that our customers love. This requires highly skilled professionals who are organized in empowered product teams and who love to develop themselves continuously. This is where you come in. You are the great people inspirator who helps these engineers to bring out the best in themselves.

As Engineering Manager for Observability & FinOps, you play an important role in how our teams work, grow and deliver value. You are responsible for the way of working, product reliability and the development of the engineers within the Observability Platform, currently centered around Splunk, and the FinOps team supporting our AWS, Azure and on-prem teams. You take ownership of enabling the teams to build and maintain highly automated, scalable and reliable products. At the same time, you create the conditions for engineers to strengthen their craft, grow their skills and contribute to NN’s digital transformation. Working in close partnership with the Product Owner, you ensure that engineering execution, product priorities, and customer value remain aligned. Together, you create an environment where teams can effectively balance business outcomes, technical health, operational stability, and continuous innovation.

Your responsibilities

• You lead and coach the teams towards modern engineering practices, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, automation, and technical excellence
• You establish and track Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) focused on reliability, engineering excellence, learning, innovation, and product outcomes together with the Product Owner, Product Manager, Domain Architect, and broader leadership team
• You effectively manage the NN’s People Cycle process and use the NN HR conversations, processes and tools to manage staffing, hiring, selection, onboarding and retention
• Creating a Strategic Workforce Planning for the team composition in line with the product strategy
• Partnering closely with the Product Owner to balance delivery commitments, technical debt reduction, platform sustainability, and long-term architectural goals
• You drive a data-driven engineering culture through the use of observability, operational metrics, service level objectives (SLOs), and continuous feedback loops
• You empower teams by removing impediments
• You help build the right culture by organizing engagement among engineers, make sure they have fun in their job and learning new skills becomes normal. Also you ensure the teams create a mindset of solving customer problems and delivering product value

As a member of the Public Cloud Domain leadership team, you actively contribute beyond your own products and teams. You collaborate with peers to define and execute the domain strategy, strengthen organizational capabilities, drive engineering standards and best practices. You support cross-domain initiatives that improve reliability, efficiency, and value delivery across the entire Public Cloud landscape. Together with Product Owners and fellow Engineering Managers, you help shape the future of cloud engineering, observability, and FinOps within NN.

About the Public Cloud Domain
The Public Cloud domain consists of the AWS and Azure platform teams, which deliver landing zones and platform services across NN, and the FinOps and Observability teams that are part of this vacancy. Together, the Public Cloud domain supports IT teams across the entire NN Group. As a domain we are moving from a self-service operating model towards delivering more frictionless engineering experiences, where operational burden is increasingly taken care of by our teams. This requires a strong change mindset from our engineers and the ability to bring stakeholders across the business along in this journey.

What we offer you
NN invests in an inclusive, inspiring work environment and in skills and competences for the future. We match this with employee benefits that are in line with what is needed today and in the future. This way, we offer our employees the opportunity to get the best out of themselves. We offer you:

• Salary between €5,339 and €7,119 based on 36 hours depending on your knowledge and experience
• 13th month and holiday allowance are paid with your monthly salary
• 27 vacation days for a 5-day working week and three Diversity Days
• A modern pension administered by BeFrank
• Plenty of training and learning opportunities
• NS Business Card 2nd class, which gives you unlimited travel, also privately. Do you prefer to travel with your own transport? Then you can declare the kilometers travelled
• Allowances for setting up your home office and for internet use

It is important to us that you continue to develop yourself. We give you the space and the confidence to grow in your career as well as a person. We help you with:

• Plenty of training and learning opportunities in our Learning & Development Centre
• A large (international) network of (engineering) colleagues who are keen to share their knowledge with you
• The autonomy to steer your own development path

Who you are
You bring a positive mindset and energy, which makes you an inspiration to collaborate with. You are experienced in the Observability technology. You always have new ideas, you see possibilities and learn from situations. This is also the mindset that you teach the engineers within your teams. Furthermore, you recognize yourself in (multiple) of the following skills and experiences:

• At least 3+ years of relevant work experience in leading and coaching technical people and teams
• You are comfortable leading highly skilled engineers, coaching them and in advising senior leadership
• You are well informed about the latest technologies and use your own skills and expertise to coach and train your engineers
• An endless drive to help people grow and provide new opportunities to learn
• You make an effort to understand other people’s perspectives and long-term ambitions
• You provide regular feedback to others. You help them with insights on their effectiveness of their performance
• You are experienced at proactively managing the recruitment lifecycle and selecting talented candidates
• You guard the long-term perspective of the company and the domain to ensure the team is fit for the future

Who you will work with
You will be working very closely together in your product domain with Product Manager, another Engineering Manager and Product Owners. You will also find your place in our teams with the engineer teams which has a variety of backgrounds and cultures with engineers working in NL and our IT Hub in Spain. We have a scale-up culture and consists of a group of 13 energetic and empowered engineers. We strive to make the Observability & FinOps capabilities successful across the entire company including our international units like Spain and Japan. We really value our culture and nourish it at every opportunity we get. Team events are regularly organized. Last year we did game days, hit the pool tables and had several dinners and drinks with the teams.

Any questions?
If you have any questions about the job, you can reach to the recruiter Elmira van der Schee (Talent Acquisition Specialist), via [email protected].