Network Observability Team Lead (Lisbon based)

About Us

1GLOBAL is a technology-driven global mobile communications provider helping enterprises and consumer brands deliver seamless connectivity worldwide. Powered by a best-in-class telecom platform, proprietary eSIM technology, and its own mobile core network across 15 countries, 1GLOBAL operates as a fully regulated telecommunications provider in 43 countries.

Founded in 2022, 1GLOBAL has rapidly become one of Europe's fastest-growing telecom technology companies, connecting more than 80 million people and devices globally. Our customers include leading banks, multinational enterprises, global retailers, travel companies, payment service providers, and digital-first businesses.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, with R&D hubs in Lisbon, Berlin, and São Paulo, 1GLOBAL employs over 550 professionals across 16 countries. With annual revenues exceeding US$200 million and a strong track record of profitability, we continue to invest in innovation, infrastructure, and international expansion as we redefine the future of global mobile connectivity.

About the Team

Join a highly specialized engineering team that builds and operates large-scale network observability platforms across Telecom, on-premises, and private/public cloud environments.

Our mission is to provide deep visibility into network performance, service quality, and operational health across distributed systems. We ingest and analyze massive telemetry streams, network traffic metadata, and service events to power real-time analytics, automated alerting, and operational dashboards used by engineering and operations teams worldwide.

As Network Observability Team Lead, you will combine people leadership with hands-on technical work. You will be accountable for the team’s delivery, development, and operational effectiveness, and shape the architecture of the telemetry pipelines and analytics platforms that turn raw network data into actionable insights. This is a player-coach role: you will lead by example through design reviews, troubleshooting, and prototyping, while giving the team the clarity, support, and autonomy to deliver.

You will report to the Head of Network Optimization, who previously led the team, ensuring leadership continuity.

About the Role

- Team Leadership & People Management: Lead and grow the team: set priorities, plan workload, and own delivery. Handle hiring, performance reviews, coaching, and career development, and build a collaborative, high-performing culture.
- Technical Strategy & Architecture: Set the technical direction and engineering standards for observability platforms, and guide architecture decisions for scale, resilience, security, and data quality.
- Delivery & Operational Ownership: Turn business needs into a clear roadmap, manage risks and dependencies, deliver predictably, and drive reliable operations, incident response, and continuous improvement.
- Hands-on Engineering: Stay hands-on with designs, prototypes, code, automation, and root-cause analysis, without becoming a bottleneck.
- Telemetry Platform Engineering: Lead large-scale pipelines that collect metrics, logs, traces, flow data, and events from systems and telecom infrastructure.
- Data Processing & Analytics: Build ETL pipelines, datasets, and dashboards that show network performance, traffic, failures, and service health.
- Monitoring, Alerting & Fault Management: Deliver effective monitoring, alerting, and anomaly detection (including predictive methods) with clear, actionable incident workflows.
- Traffic Visibility Architecture: Oversee traffic capture and aggregation using packet brokers, TAPs, traffic mirroring, and virtual TAPs.
- Platform Automation & Operations: Automate deployment, configuration, and lifecycle management using Infrastructure-as-Code and containers.
- Cross-Team Collaboration: Work with network, platform, and operations teams and stakeholders to align on priorities and outcomes.

Requirements

About You

Must Have

- Leadership Experience: Experience leading engineers, mentoring, planning delivery, giving feedback, and working with stakeholders; ready to take on formal people management.
- Technical Leadership: Able to own architecture, lead design reviews, make pragmatic trade-offs, and troubleshoot complex production systems hands-on.
- Systems & Platform Engineering: Strong Linux skills, experience running distributed production systems, and familiarity with OSS environments.
- Observability & Telemetry: Hands-on with Prometheus, Thanos, Loki, Tempo, and Grafana for infrastructure and network telemetry.
- Telemetry Pipelines: Vector, Telegraf, Fluentd, and Kafka, plus protocols such as SNMP, Syslog, NetFlow, and IPFIX.
- Data Engineering & ETL: Building data models and ingestion, enrichment, and transformation pipelines with Apache NiFi or similar.
- Telecom Service Assurance & Traffic Analytics: NumoData (formerly EXFO Nova), Radcom, or similar, plus packet capture and traffic analysis.
- Monitoring & Fault Management: SNMP traps, Alertmanager, and OpenNMS or similar monitoring tools.
- Databases: ClickHouse or Vertica, PostgreSQL or MySQL, and Redis.
- Networking & Telecom: Strong knowledge of telecom network architecture, telemetry, traffic mirroring, TAPs, virtual TAPs, and packet brokers.
- Programming & Automation: Python and Go; Ansible for PNF/VNF deployment and Helm for CNF environments.
- Communication & Education: Professional English and clear technical communication. Degree in Telecommunications, Computer Science, Data Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Nice to Have

- Modern Telemetry Protocols: OpenTelemetry, gNMI, gRPC streaming, OpenConfig, eBPF, or custom instrumentation.
- Advanced Data Engineering: High-volume ingestion, real-time analytics, and large-scale event processing.
- Observability AI/ML: Predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and trend analysis for monitoring.
- Cloud & Platform Automation: Kubernetes (AWS EKS, OpenStack Magnum + Heat), Kubernetes Operators, Terraform, CloudFormation, and CI/CD.
- Cloud & Distributed Observability: High-availability observability platforms in private/public cloud, and analytics database tuning.

Benefits

Why 1GLOBAL?

- Growth Opportunities: Advance your career in one of the fastest growing telecommunications companies, expanding over 50% year-on-year under the leadership of successful tech entrepreneurs.
- Major Transaction Exposure: Be in the driver’s seat for transactions that will have an impact on the future telco industry.
- Work with a Talented Team: From the Board and the Founders to the Senior Management Team, you will collaborate daily with the most capable and renowned external advisors and constantly being exposed to talented and driven individuals.
- Dynamic Work Environment: Thrive in a collaborative, fast-paced workplace where innovation is encouraged, and every contribution counts.
- Professional Development: Work alongside industry experts to enhance your skills and knowledge in a cutting-edge field.
- International Experience: Gain opportunities to work in different 1GLOBAL offices around the world as you grow within the company.
- Open Communication Culture: Join a team where your ideas are heard, and open dialogue is encouraged, fostering a supportive and transparent work environment.
- Get Things Done Attitude: Be part of a results-driven team that values efficiency, creativity, and the drive to make a tangible impact in the industry.

1GLOBAL is an equal opportunity employer, we value your character as much as your talent. Diversity drives our innovation, and we offer a collaborative, dynamic, and international work environment. We are excited for you to join our mission to revolutionise connectivity globally.