Staff Backend Observability Tech Lead

Affirm, Inc.; Baltimore (MD); 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 efforts. You will own the telemetry architecture, drive cross‑functional projects, and mentor a six‑person team, partnering with infrastructure and product teams to ensure reliable, scalable systems.

You will focus on implementing wide events, sampling, and robust instrumentation, while guiding technical strategy and fostering a culture of ownership and quality across engineering teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience with distributed systems and telemetry tooling.
• Strong understanding of observability practices and SLOs.
• Ability to drive architecture, strategy and cross‑functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of AFFIRM’s telemetry pipeline for 200+ TB/day.
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce data volume and cost without losing signal.
• Shape integration of observability into agentic development and AI coding workflows.
• Set and communicate the technical strategy for the team on a yearly horizon.
• Collaborate across product, design and analytics to ensure sustainability and risk management.
• Mentor and grow a 6-engineer team while driving reliable operation and on‑call readiness.

Skills

Backend design

Distributed systems

OpenTelemetry

Kafka

Terraform

Kubernetes

Python

Kotlin

Education

Bachelor’s degree

Tools

AWS

MySQL

Flink

Kubernetes

Job description

AFFIRM, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead observability efforts. You will own the telemetry architecture, drive cross‑functional projects, and mentor a six‑person team, partnering with infrastructure and product teams to ensure reliable, scalable systems.

You will focus on implementing wide events, sampling, and robust instrumentation, while guiding technical strategy and fostering a culture of ownership and quality across engineering teams.