Staff Backend Observability Engineer (Remote)

Affirm, Inc.; Boulder (CO); Remote; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Tech setup stipends

Flexible time off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

AFFIRM, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability.

You’ll be hands-on most of the time while defining the roadmap, driving cross-functional projects, mentoring a team of engineers, and partnering with infrastructure and product teams. You’ll own the telemetry pipeline architecture, design log sampling strategies, and shape observability within agentic development, guiding the team’s year-long technical strategy and collaboration across product management, design, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale using Python or Kotlin.
• Experience building highly available distributed systems with AWS, MySQL, Flink and Kubernetes.
• Built or operated telemetry systems (metrics, logs, traces) using OpenTelemetry, Kafka and Terraform.
• Strong observability knowledge: wide events, sampling, cardinality, and SLOs.
• Driven adoption of a platform standard across many teams via tooling and engagement.
• Delivered major features or components with clear technical/execution plans.
• Thrives in ambiguity, from low-level code to large system architecture.
• Strong verbal and written communication for global collaboration.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture of the telemetry pipeline balancing reliability, performance and cost.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost while preserving signal.
• Shape observability integration in agentic development for AI coding agents and code review.
• Set technical strategy for the team over a year and align with business priorities.
• Collaborate across product management, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and understood trade-offs.
• Advocate for technical solutions and operational processes as a force multiplier.
• Ensure operations and availability with monitoring, on-call playbooks, testing and alerting.
• Set and promote code review and design standards beyond the team.
• Mentor and guide team members, providing feedback and leadership by example.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

Mentoring

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

AFFIRM, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Observability.

You’ll be hands-on most of the time while defining the roadmap, driving cross-functional projects, mentoring a team of engineers, and partnering with infrastructure and product teams. You’ll own the telemetry pipeline architecture, design log sampling strategies, and shape observability within agentic development, guiding the team’s year-long technical strategy and collaboration across product management, design, and