Staff Backend Engineer, Observability Lead (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Raleigh (NC); Remote; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability, acting as the technical lead for telemetry pipelines and cross‑functional initiatives. You’ll spend significant time hands-on while shaping roadmaps, mentoring six engineers, and partnering with infrastructure and product teams.

You will own the telemetry architecture, design log sampling, and drive observability integration into development with AI-assisted review, while setting the team’s long-term strategy and ensuring

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin and modern backend architectures.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and observability best practices.
• Experience delivering high-availability platforms using AWS, Kubernetes, and related tooling.
• Hands-on experience with telemetry stacks (metrics/logs/traces) and data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of AFFIRM’s telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day and optimize reliability and cost.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume without losing critical signal.
• Shape observability integration into agentic development and AI-assisted review.
• Set the technical strategy for your team and align with business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and clear trade-offs.
• Define and promote technical solutions and operational processes as a force multiplier.
• Oversee team operations, monitoring, triage, runbooks, testing, and on-call readiness.
• Establish coding and design standards and advocate for them across the org.
• Develop talent through feedback, mentorship, and role-model leadership.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

Observability

AWS

Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Flink

MySQL

Job description

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability, acting as the technical lead for telemetry pipelines and cross‑functional initiatives. You’ll spend significant time hands-on while shaping roadmaps, mentoring six engineers, and partnering with infrastructure and product teams.

You will own the telemetry architecture, design log sampling, and drive observability integration into development with AI-assisted review, while setting the team’s long-term strategy and ensuring