Staff Backend Engineer, Observability Platform Lead

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage and stipends

Equity rewards

401k or equivalent benefits

Job summary

Affrim is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You will own the telemetry pipeline architecture, drive cross-functional projects, mentor six engineers, and collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to ensure scalable, observable systems.

You will guide log sampling and AI-assisted code instrumentation, while shaping a year-long technical strategy for your team and aligning it with business priorities. Remote Canada-based with Alberta eligibility.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive experience building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Flink, Kubernetes.
• Built or operated telemetry systems (metrics/logs/traces) with OpenTelemetry, Kafka and Terraform.
• Strong view on modern observability practices: structured/wide events, sampling, cardinality, and SLOs.
• Led adoption of platform standards across multiple teams with tooling and engagement.
• Able to deliver major features or components with a clear technical/execution plan.
• Comfortable moving from low-level code to large system architecture, withambition and curiosity.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of Affrim’s telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day, balancing reliability, performance and cost.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost without losing signal.
• Shape how observability fits into agentic development and AI-assisted coding workflows.
• Set long-term technical strategy for the team and tie it to business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate across product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and manage risks.

Skills

Python/Kotlin

Distributed systems

Observability

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

Job description

Affrim is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You will own the telemetry pipeline architecture, drive cross-functional projects, mentor six engineers, and collaborate with infrastructure and product teams to ensure scalable, observable systems.

You will guide log sampling and AI-assisted code instrumentation, while shaping a year-long technical strategy for your team and aligning it with business priorities. Remote Canada-based with Alberta eligibility.