Senior Software Engineer, Observability

Digitailor; Seattle (WA); Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Airwallex is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Observability team. You will build and operate scalable observability platforms, enabling engineers to monitor and troubleshoot services across distributed systems.

The role emphasizes incident management, telemetry, and reliability in a cloud-native environment. You will collaborate with global engineering teams, define standards, mentor engineers, and drive improvements in SRE practices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code to

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building and operating production systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming language, such as Go, Java, Python, or Kotlin.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
• Practical experience with observability platforms and technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or equivalent solutions.
• Strong understanding of metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and incident management.
• Experience with cloud-native environments, Kubernetes, containers, and public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and automated software delivery, using tools such as Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong system design and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make sound technical decisions in complex and ambiguous environments.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work effectively with globally distributed engineering teams.
• An ownership mindset and a commitment to improving systems rather than simply treating symptoms.
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate highly scalable observability platforms covering metrics, logs, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, and service health.
• Develop reliable software and platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to instrument, monitor, and troubleshoot their services with minimal friction.
• Establish and evolve observability standards, including telemetry collection, instrumentation, alert quality, SLOs, SLIs, service ownership, and operational readiness.
• Improve incident detection, diagnosis, and response through actionable alerts, intelligent correlation, service dependency visibility, and effective runbooks.
• Build self-service tools and paved paths that make best practices the easiest way for engineers to adopt observability.
• Partner closely with application, infrastructure, SRE, security, and product teams to understand operational challenges and deliver durable solutions.
• Improve the scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of observability systems across multiple regions and environments.
• Participate in design reviews, technical planning, code reviews, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

Skills

Backend development

Observability tooling

Distributed systems

Cloud & Kubernetes

Communication

Ownership mindset

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

OpenTelemetry

ELK

Jaeger

Tempo

ClickHouse

Elasticsearch

Kafka

Job description

About Airwallex Airwallex is the AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. More than 675,000 businesses, including McLaren Racing, Qantas, SHEIN, and TikTok, use us, directly or through our platform partners, to run their financial operations or build and monetize financial products of their own. We started in Melbourne in 2015 to build the infrastructure global commerce runs on. We're the regulated backbone behind global payments: not by accident, but by design. A decade plus, 85+ licenses, and a financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,700 people across 27 offices. We hire builders with founder-level energy, people who move fast with good judgment, dig in with real curiosity, and make calls from first principles rather than waiting to be told what to do. Read our operating principles to see it in full. How you'll make impact The Infrastructure & Productivity team builds the technical foundation that enables Airwallex’s global engineering organisation to scale. Our customers are fellow engineers, and we make their work faster, safer, and more effective through reliable platforms, automation, and observability systems. As a Senior Software Engineer on the Observability team, you’ll build and operate the platforms that give engineering teams clear, timely, and actionable insight into the health and performance of Airwallex’s distributed systems. You’ll help reduce time to detect and resolve incidents, improve system reliability, and establish scalable observability practices across the company. Build and operate highly scalable observability platforms covering metrics, logs, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, and service health. Develop reliable software and platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to instrument, monitor, and troubleshoot their services with minimal friction. Establish and evolve observability standards, including telemetry collection, instrumentation, alert quality, SLOs, SLIs, service ownership, and operational readiness. Improve incident detection, diagnosis, and response through actionable alerts, intelligent correlation, service dependency visibility, and effective runbooks. Build self-service tools and paved paths that make best practices the easiest way for engineers to adopt observability. Partner closely with application, infrastructure, SRE, security, and product teams to understand operational challenges and deliver durable solutions. Improve the scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of observability systems across multiple regions and environments. Participate in design reviews, technical planning, code reviews, incident response, and post-incident learning. Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of ownership, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

What We'Re Looking For

Essentials 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of building and operating production systems. Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming language, such as Go, Java, Python, or Kotlin. Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale. Practical experience with observability platforms and technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or equivalent solutions. Strong understanding of metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and incident management. Experience with cloud-native environments, Kubernetes, containers, and public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. Experience with infrastructure as code and automated software delivery, using tools such as Terraform and CI/CD pipelines. Strong system design and problem-solving skills, with the ability to make sound technical decisions in complex and ambiguous environments. Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to work effectively with globally distributed engineering teams. An ownership mindset and a commitment to improving systems rather than simply treating symptoms. Preferred Experience building observability platforms or internal developer platforms used by multiple engineering teams. Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Loki, Tempo, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Kafka, or similar technologies. Experience designing high-volume telemetry ingestion, storage, querying, aggregation, and retention systems. Familiarity with SRE practices, including on-call operations, incident response, postmortems, runbooks, and error budgets. Experience with service meshes, Kubernetes operators, or large-scale microservice platforms. Contributions to observability, cloud infrastructure, reliability, or open-source projects. Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline. You'll thrive here if You're comfortable owning the roadmap yourself. You're comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and moving quickly anyway. You’re comfortable operating across time zones with a globally distributed team, including colleagues based in APAC and EMEA. You say what you mean. You're direct, but you lead with respect. You connect dots across functions and hold the big picture without losing grip on the details.