Staff Backend Observability Engineer — Platform Lead

Affirm, Inc.; Los Angeles (CA); Remote; USD 230.000 - 290.000; Vollzeit

Benefits dieser Stelle

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly stipends for tech setup

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Zusammenfassung

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability, combining hands-on work with roadmap planning. You will mentor six engineers, collaborate across product and infrastructure, and drive improvements in telemetry handling for massive-scale checkout data.

You’ll shape eventing strategies, implement cost-aware telemetry pipelines, and champion robust monitoring practices. This remote-first role emphasizes leadership and hands-on excellence in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifikationen

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive track record building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Flink and Kubernetes.
• Experience building or operating high-volume telemetry systems using OpenTelemetry, Kafka, Terraform.
• Strong understanding of modern observability practices like wide events, sampling, cardinality management, and SLOs.
• Experience driving platform standards across engineering teams through tooling and engagement.

Aufgaben

• 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 while preserving signal during incidents.
• Shape how observability fits into agentic development, enabling AI coding agents and reviews to catch gaps.
• Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon and align with business-impacting projects.
• Collaborate with product management, design & analytics to ensure sustainability, risks, and trade-offs are understood.
• Act as a force-multiplier by defining and advocating technical solutions and operational processes.
• Ensure team operations and availability through monitoring, rotation; establish playbooks, policies, tests, and alerts.
• Foster a culture of quality and ownership via code review standards and cross-team advocacy.
• Develop talent by giving feedback, guidance, and leading by example.

Kenntnisse

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

Observability concepts

Cross-functional collaboration

Ausbildung

Bachelor's degree in a related field

Equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

Jobbeschreibung

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability, combining hands-on work with roadmap planning. You will mentor six engineers, collaborate across product and infrastructure, and drive improvements in telemetry handling for massive-scale checkout data.

You’ll shape eventing strategies, implement cost-aware telemetry pipelines, and champion robust monitoring practices. This remote-first role emphasizes leadership and hands-on excellence in a fast-paced environment.