Senior Backend Engineer, Observability Lead (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Canada; Remote; CAD 181,000 - 241,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Equity rewards

ESPP program

Health coverage

Job summary

Affrim is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to be the technical lead for Observability. You’ll spend most of your time hands‑on while defining the roadmap, driving cross‑functional projects, mentoring a team of six engineers, and partnering closely with infrastructure and product teams.

You will own the architecture of Affrim’s telemetry pipeline, design log sampling strategies, and shape how observability fits into agentic development. Remote-first with flexible in Canada.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin and distributed architectures.
• Strong background in observability and telemetry tooling.
• Ability to drive platform standards and cross-team collaboration.
• Proven track record mentoring engineers and delivering impact.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of Affrim’s telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling to reduce volume and cost without losing signal.
• Shape observability integration within agentic development.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon.
• Collaborate with product, design, analytics to ensure sustainable tech choices.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations, monitoring, playbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Establish code review and design standards and evangelize them.
• Mentor and guide team members with feedback and leadership by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Communication

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

Affrim is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to be the technical lead for Observability. You’ll spend most of your time hands‑on while defining the roadmap, driving cross‑functional projects, mentoring a team of six engineers, and partnering closely with infrastructure and product teams.

You will own the architecture of Affrim’s telemetry pipeline, design log sampling strategies, and shape how observability fits into agentic development. Remote-first with flexible in Canada.