Remote Staff Backend Engineer — Observability Platform Lead

Affirm, Inc.; Boston (MA); Remote; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Stock options

Health coverage and stipends

Learning and development

Job summary

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You’ll own the telemetry pipeline architecture for 200+ TB/day, drive log sampling strategies, and align observability with AI-assisted code reviews. You’ll mentor six engineers and partner with infrastructure and product teams.

You will define the technical roadmap, foster a culture of quality, and ensure reliable monitoring, incident response, and on-call readiness across multiple services and clusters.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using languages like Python or Kotlin.
• Experience with high-volume telemetry systems (metrics, logs, traces) and OpenTelemetry, Kafka or Terraform.
• Strong understanding of modern observability practices and SLOs; platform standard adoption across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of AFFIRM’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 observability integration into agentic development and AI-assisted coding workflows.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a yearly timescale and align with business goals.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and risk management.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Python

Kotlin

Mentoring

Communication

Leadership

AWS

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You’ll own the telemetry pipeline architecture for 200+ TB/day, drive log sampling strategies, and align observability with AI-assisted code reviews. You’ll mentor six engineers and partner with infrastructure and product teams.

You will define the technical roadmap, foster a culture of quality, and ensure reliable monitoring, incident response, and on-call readiness across multiple services and clusters.