Staff Backend Engineer, Observability & Telemetry (Remote)

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for dependents

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affrim is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You’ll own the architecture of our telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, performance, and cost for 200+ TB/day.

You’ll design log-sampling strategies to reduce volume while preserving signal during incidents. You’ll shape how observability fits into agentic development, mentor a team of six engineers, and drive cross-functional initiatives with product, design and analytics to ensure sustainable, scalable instrumentation

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend design, development and launch at scale (Python or Kotlin).
• Proven record of highly available distributed systems (AWS, MySQL, Flink, Kubernetes).
• Built or operated high-volume telemetry systems (OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Terraform).
• Strong view on modern observability such as wide events, sampling, SLOs.
• Led platform standard adoption across engineering teams via tooling and engagement.
• Delivered major features or components with a clear technical/exec plan; writes high-quality code.
• Thrives in ambiguity, from low-level idioms to large system architecture.
• Growth trajectory showing feedback from peers; strong collaboration.
• Strong verbal and written communication for a global team.

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 while preserving signal for incidents.
• Shape observability in agentic development so AI coding agents catch instrumentation gaps before ship.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with business priorities.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainable instrumentation and risk management.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining and promoting technical solutions and processes.
• Own team operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Set and advocate design standards to raise code quality across teams.
• Mentor teammates with feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

Skills

Backend design & development

Distributed systems

Observability

Leadership & mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

written communication

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

Job description

Affrim is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You’ll own the architecture of our telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, performance, and cost for 200+ TB/day.

You’ll design log-sampling strategies to reduce volume while preserving signal during incidents. You’ll shape how observability fits into agentic development, mentor a team of six engineers, and drive cross-functional initiatives with product, design and analytics to ensure sustainable, scalable instrumentation