Thomas Barnes
Head of Observability @Worldpay
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WORK HISTORY
Head of Observability @Worldpay
London, GB
As Head of Observability at Worldpay, I lead the strategic vision and delivery of e2e observability across our payments ecosystem. My mission is to provide actionable insights that ensure every transaction - whether from a global enterprise or a local mum-and-pop shop - is fast, reliable, and resilient.Key responsibilities include:End-to-End Payment Tracing: Implementing OpenTelemetry (OTEL) across our services to enable full traceability of payments from the tap of a card or click of a button, to settlement, ensuring rapid detection and resolution of issues.Visualisation & Dashboards: Delivering intuitive, actionable dashboards and reporting that give stakeholders and engineers clear visibility into system performance and reliability.Champion Networks & Training: Establishing an Observability Champions program, providing training, onboarding, and guidance to teams to embed best practices across the organisation.Standardisation & Self-Service: Driving consistency in SLIs, SLOs, and monitoring standards while empowering teams with self-service tools to instrument, observe, and automate with confidence.Automation & Efficiency: Leveraging automation to reduce toil, improve reliability, and enable data-driven decision making at scale.Customer Centric Reliability: Ensuring our observability practices support both high-value enterprise clients and smaller merchants alike, delivering trust and reliability for every payment experience.I partner closely with engineering, product, and operations leadership to ensure observability drives measurable improvements in system stability, operational efficiency, and ROI.
EDUCATION
City College Plymouth
BTEC ND Computer Programming and Software Development
University of Wales, Newport
BSc (Hons), Games Development and Artificial Intelligence
SKILLS
ABOUT THOMAS BARNES
I’m a technical director and engineer passionate about making systems more reliable, observable, and low-risk. As Head of Observability at Worldpay, I’m leading a major equalisation and standardisation programme, consolidating a complex landscape of observability tools and contracts into a unified, scalable platform built around OpenTelemetry, automation, and actionable insights.My focus is on self-enablement and consistency - giving engineering teams the frameworks, tooling, and confidence to instrument, trace, and visualise their own services in a standard way. I founded our Observability Champions network and work hands-on to accelerate onboarding, unblock issues, and embed reliability practices across the organisation.Before Worldpay, I led Site Reliability Engineering at several platforms in Lloyds Banking Group, running the SRE Guild and creating frameworks that improved stability, reduced operational risk, and delivered measurable ROI. I bridge executive strategy and engineering execution, ensuring observability is not just a set of tools, but a strategic enabler for risk reduction, cost efficiency, and customer trust.
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