Data Engineer (Contract) 9+ Month Contract based in Sheffield £395 - £442 per day InsideIR35 BPSS clearance required - candidates must be eligible My client is seeking a Data Engineer to design and operate large-scale telemetry and observability data pipelines within a modern OpenShift and Kafka ecosystem. This role is central to enabling proactive, Level 4 observability, delivering high-quality metrics, logs, and traces to support platform reliability, operational insight, and automation. Responsibilities: * Design, implement and maintain scalable data pipelines to ingest and process OpenShift telemetry (metrics, logs, traces) * Stream telemetry through Kafka (producers, topics, schemas) and build resilient consumer services for enrichment and transformation * Engineer multi-tenant observability data models, ensuring data lineage, quality controls and SLAs across streaming layers * Integrate processed telemetry into Splunk for dashboards, analytics, alerting and operational insights * Implement schema management and governance using Avro/Protobuf, including versioning and compatibility strategies * Build automated validation, replay and backfill mechanisms to ensure data reliability and recovery * Instrument services using OpenTelemetry, standardising tracing, metrics and structured logging * Apply LLMs to enhance observability, such as query assistance, anomaly summarisation and runbook generation * Collaborate with Platform, SRE and Application teams to align telemetry, alerts and SLOs * Ensure pipelines meet security, compliance and best-practice standards * Produce clear documentation covering data flows, schemas, dashboards and operational runbooks Skills & Experience: * Strong hands-on experience building streaming data pipelines with Kafka (producers/consumers, schema registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL/KStreams) * Experience with OpenShift / Kubernetes telemetry, including OpenTelemetry and Prometheus * Proven capability integrating telemetry into Splunk (HEC, Universal Forwarders, sourcetypes, CIM, dashboards, alerting) * Solid data engineering skills in Python (or similar) for ETL/ELT, enrichment and validation Please apply for immediate interview! CBSbutler is operating and advertising as an Employment Agency for permanent positions and as an Employment Business for interim / contract / temporary positions. CBSbutler is an Equal Opportunities employer and we encourage applicants from all backgrounds