Remote Senior Backend Engineer, Observability Platform

Affirm, Inc.; Salt Lake City (UT); Remote; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and dependent coverage

Tech setup stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

AFFIRM, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You will own the telemetry architecture, guide log sampling strategies, and shape how observability integrates with AI-driven development.

You’ll drive cross-functional initiatives, mentor six engineers, and partner with infra and product teams to ensure scalable, reliable instrumentation. You’ll work in a remote-first environment with a roadmap for the year, focusing on performance, cost, and signal quality across 200+

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience building highly available distributed systems in AWS, MySQL, Flink, and Kubernetes.
• Proven track record with telemetry systems (metrics/logs/traces) and OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Terraform.
• Strong perspective on modern observability practices and SLOs.
• Ability to drive a platform standard across multiple teams and deliver major features.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture of AFFIRM’s telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day with reliability and cost considerations.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume while preserving signal for incidents.
• Shape observability integration in agentic development and AI coding agents.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a yearly horizon and align with business goals.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and manage risks.
• Act as force-multiplier by defining technical solutions and operational processes.
• Own team operations and availability with monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, and on-call readiness.
• Foster quality and ownership through code review standards and cross-team advocacy.
• Mentor and develop talent, providing feedback and leading by example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems design

Observability concepts

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in a related field

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

AFFIRM, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You will own the telemetry architecture, guide log sampling strategies, and shape how observability integrates with AI-driven development.

You’ll drive cross-functional initiatives, mentor six engineers, and partner with infra and product teams to ensure scalable, reliable instrumentation. You’ll work in a remote-first environment with a roadmap for the year, focusing on performance, cost, and signal quality across 200+