Staff Backend Engineer, Observability Lead (Remote + Equity)

Affirm, Inc.; Sioux Falls (SD); Remote; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for employees and deps

Tech spending stipends

Generous time off and holidays

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Observability to lead a cross-functional team of six engineers. You will own the telemetry pipeline architecture, guide log sampling, and align with product and design teams to ensure reliable, scalable observability across thousands of services.

You will mentor engineers, drive cross-team initiatives, and define long-term technical strategy while balancing performance, cost, and reliability in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Extensive track record of building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Flink and Kubernetes.
• Experience building or operating high-volume telemetry systems (metrics, logs, traces) using OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Terraform.
• Knowledge of modern observability practices including wide events, sampling, cardinality management, and SLOs.
• Experience driving platform standards across engineering teams via tooling and engagement.
• Ability to write high-quality code that is easily understood and used by others.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, query performance, and cost.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost while preserving signal.
• Shape observability integration into agentic development and AI coding agents.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a yearly horizon and align with business goals.
• Collaborate with product management, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and manage risks.
• Serve as a force multiplier by defining technical solutions and operational processes.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Observability to lead a cross-functional team of six engineers. You will own the telemetry pipeline architecture, guide log sampling, and align with product and design teams to ensure reliable, scalable observability across thousands of services.

You will mentor engineers, drive cross-team initiatives, and define long-term technical strategy while balancing performance, cost, and reliability in a remote-first environment.