Staff Backend Observability Engineer – Telemetry Lead

Affirm, Inc.; Portland (OR); Remote; USD 204,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage for you and dependents

Monthly tech stipends

Flexible time off

Job summary

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Observability to lead the telemetry platform. You’ll code hands-on while shaping the roadmap, mentor six engineers, and partner with infrastructure and product teams to ensure reliability and performance at scale.

You’ll define strategies for log sampling, wide events, and instrumentation, balancing cost with signal fidelity, and you’ll champion quality, operability and cross‑functional collaboration across the organization.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience building highly available distributed telemmetry pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of modern observability practices and SLOs.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling to cut volume and cost while preserving signal.
• Define technical strategy and roadmaps for the Observability team.
• Mentor a team of engineers and collaborate with product and infra teams.

Skills

Backend design

Python

Kotlin

Distributed systems

Observability

Mentorship

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Job description

AFFIRM is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Observability to lead the telemetry platform. You’ll code hands-on while shaping the roadmap, mentor six engineers, and partner with infrastructure and product teams to ensure reliability and performance at scale.

You’ll define strategies for log sampling, wide events, and instrumentation, balancing cost with signal fidelity, and you’ll champion quality, operability and cross‑functional collaboration across the organization.