Staff Backend Engineer, Observability Lead (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Dallas (TX); Remote; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly tech stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Observability to lead and shape the telemetry platform used by our backend services. You’ll drive architecture, guide a team of six, and partner with infrastructure and product teams to ensure reliable, scalable observability across thousands of services.

You’ll design sampling, define standards, and mentor engineers while maintaining hands-on contribution in code and architecture for high-impact initiatives.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin in production environments.
• Strong background in distributed systems and telemetry pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of AFFIRM’s telemetry pipeline (200+ TB/day).
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost while preserving signal.
• Shape observability integration in agentic development and AI coding agents.
• Set and drive technical strategy for the team on long time horizons.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability, risks and trade-offs are understood.
• Champion code quality, design standards, and operating practices across the team.
• Lead operations, monitoring, on-call readiness, and incident playbooks.
• Mentor engineers and help develop talent within the team.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

AWS

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Observability to lead and shape the telemetry platform used by our backend services. You’ll drive architecture, guide a team of six, and partner with infrastructure and product teams to ensure reliable, scalable observability across thousands of services.

You’ll design sampling, define standards, and mentor engineers while maintaining hands-on contribution in code and architecture for high-impact initiatives.