Remote Staff Engineer, Observability Platform Lead

Affirm, Inc.; Boise (ID); Remote; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% subsidized medical coverage

Monthly tech stipends

Generous time off

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

AFFIRM's Observability team seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead telemetry architecture and drive cross‑functional projects. You’ll mentor a team of six engineers, partner with product, analytics and design, and own the roadmap while staying hands-on.

You will design sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost, shape observability within agentic development, and own operations, on-call readiness, and coding standards across teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin and building distributed systems.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL, Flink, and Kubernetes.
• Strong knowledge of observability practices including OpenTelemetry, sampling, and SLOs.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of AFFIRM’s telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost while preserving signal during incidents.
• Shape how observability fits into agentic development and AI-assisted coding tools.
• Set technical strategy for your team on a year-long horizon and drive cross-functional initiatives.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to manage risks and trade-offs.
• Lead by example with code quality, design standards, and scalable practices.

Skills

Python or Kotlin

Distributed systems

OpenTelemetry & tracing

AWS

Kubernetes

Kafka

Strong communication

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Flink

MySQL

Job description

AFFIRM's Observability team seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead telemetry architecture and drive cross‑functional projects. You’ll mentor a team of six engineers, partner with product, analytics and design, and own the roadmap while staying hands-on.

You will design sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost, shape observability within agentic development, and own operations, on-call readiness, and coding standards across teams.