Staff Backend Engineer, Observability & Telemetry

Affirm, Inc.; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Tech stipends

Flexible time off

ESPP

Job summary

Affirm, Inc. is seeking an experienced backend engineer to own the telemetry pipeline architecture and drive observability across a large-scale platform.

You will design sampling strategies, shape how observability fits into agentic development, and lead technical strategy for the team over a year-long horizon. You will collaborate across product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and measured risk.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL, Flink and Kubernetes.
• Built or operated high-volume telemetry systems using OpenTelemetry, Kafka and Terraform.
• Strong view on observability practices: structured and wide events, sampling, cardinality, and SLOs.
• Driven adoption of a platform standard across engineering teams via tooling and engagement.
• Able to move from low level language idioms to architecture of large systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of affirm's telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, query performance, and cost at 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost without losing signal during incidents.
• Shape observability within agentic development for AI coding agents and code review.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with business projects.
• Collaborate across product, design and analytics for sustainability, risks and trade-offs.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and processes.
• Own team operations and availability with monitoring, on-call rotations, playbooks and testing.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership through code review standards and mentoring.

Skills

Backend systems

Python/Kotlin

Distributed systems

AWS

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

SLOs

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

MySQL

Flink

Kafka

Terraform

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Affirm, Inc. is seeking an experienced backend engineer to own the telemetry pipeline architecture and drive observability across a large-scale platform.

You will design sampling strategies, shape how observability fits into agentic development, and lead technical strategy for the team over a year-long horizon. You will collaborate across product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and measured risk.