Staff Backend Engineer, Observability & Telemetry Lead

Affirm, Inc.; San Jose (CA); Remote; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly tech setup stipends

Generous time off & holidays

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Job summary

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You’ll own the telemetry architecture, guide cross‑functional efforts, mentor six engineers, and partner with infrastructure and product teams to deliver reliable, scalable observability across the platform.

You’ll drive strategy for a year‑long roadmap, influence engineering practices, and ensure high-quality instrumentation and incident response. This role is remote‑first in the US.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with Python or Kotlin for backend development.
• Proven track record building highly available distributed systems.
• Experience with telemetry systems and modern observability practices.
• Ability to drive platform standard adoption across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce cost while preserving signal.
• Shape observability integration within agentic development and AI tooling.
• Set technical strategy and align with business priorities for the team.
• Collaborate with product, design, and analytics to ensure sustainability and risk management.
• Act as force-multiplier for the team through solutions and processes.
• Ensure operations and availability with monitoring, on-call readiness, and playbooks.
• Establish and promote code quality and design standards beyond the team.
• Mentor and guide team talent through feedback and example.

Skills

Python

Kotlin

Backend design

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability. You’ll own the telemetry architecture, guide cross‑functional efforts, mentor six engineers, and partner with infrastructure and product teams to deliver reliable, scalable observability across the platform.

You’ll drive strategy for a year‑long roadmap, influence engineering practices, and ensure high-quality instrumentation and incident response. This role is remote‑first in the US.