Staff Backend Engineer, Observability (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 204,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly work setup

100% subsidized medical coverage for你/

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability) to lead the telemetry platform across our services. This role blends hands-on engineering with roadmapping, mentoring six engineers, and partnering with infra and product teams.

You will define strategies to improve reliability, cost, and performance for 200+ TB/day of logs, metrics, and traces. You will design sampling, shaping observability for AI-assisted code and agentic development, and own the technical direction

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend experience design, develop and launch at scale.
• Experience with distributed systems and telemetry pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of observability practices and SLOs.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and modern data tech.
• Excellent verbal and written communication for cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the observability telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost while preserving signal.
• Shape how observability integrates with agentic development and AI tooling.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a yearly horizon and drive cross-team initiatives.
• Collaborate with product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and manage risks.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

Observability

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability) to lead the telemetry platform across our services. This role blends hands-on engineering with roadmapping, mentoring six engineers, and partnering with infra and product teams.

You will define strategies to improve reliability, cost, and performance for 200+ TB/day of logs, metrics, and traces. You will design sampling, shaping observability for AI-assisted code and agentic development, and own the technical direction