Staff Backend Engineer, Observability Lead - Remote

Affirm, Inc.; Cleveland (OH); Remote; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage at no cost

Monthly tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. The Observability team builds the platform engineers rely on to understand system behavior and performance, ingesting 200+ TB/day of metrics, logs, and traces from hundreds of services across Kubernetes clusters.

The role blends hands-on work with roadmap ownership and cross-functional collaboration. You will mentor a team of six engineers, partner with infrastructure and product teams, and drive initiatives to improve

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin in production.
• Proven ability to build highly available distributed systems.
• Experience with telemetry systems (metrics/logs/traces).
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost.
• Shape observability in agentic development with AI coding agents.
• Set technical strategy for your team over a year.
• Collaborate with product management, design and analytics.
• Ensure monitoring, on-call readiness, and runbooks.

Skills

Python/Kotlin

Distributed systems

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. The Observability team builds the platform engineers rely on to understand system behavior and performance, ingesting 200+ TB/day of metrics, logs, and traces from hundreds of services across Kubernetes clusters.

The role blends hands-on work with roadmap ownership and cross-functional collaboration. You will mentor a team of six engineers, partner with infrastructure and product teams, and drive initiatives to improve