Staff Engineer - Observability

Adyen; City of Amsterdam (NY); On-site; USD 163,000 - 232,000; Full time

Job summary

Adyen is seeking a Staff Engineer for Observability to drive the long-term evolution of our global telemetry and monitoring ecosystem. You will bridge telemetry infrastructure, developer pipelines, and AI-driven analytics at scale.

You will shape the roadmap around Intelligent Observability, Unified Data Foundation, and Zero-Friction Configuration, while guiding teams through complex distributed systems challenges and fostering engineering excellence.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software, systems, or platform engineering with leadership in observability or large-scale data systems.
• Experience designing and operating telemetry data engines at multi-petabyte scale.
• Understanding of structuring telemetry for AI/LLM consumption and RAG pipelines.
• Experience adopting telemetry frameworks (e.g., OpenTelemetry) and SLO-driven alerting.
• Proficiency in Go, Java, or Python and building automated tooling for real-time data ingestion.

Responsibilities

• Architect and execute the strategic tech direction for a global observability platform.
• Revamp data foundations: petabyte-scale search, logging, and metrics systems.
• Build APIs and interfaces to connect data foundations with AI agents and tools.
• Decompose monolithic monitoring into resilient, regional architectures.
• Create self-service tooling with GitOps, schema enforcement, and quota control.
• Provide technical leadership and code reviews across the observability domain.
• Advocate telemetry capabilities and drive adoption of developer-facing tools.

Skills

Distributed systems

Go/Java/Python

Kubernetes

Observability

AI-ready telemetry

Tools

OpenTelemetry

GitOps

Job description

This is Adyen

Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition.

For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.

Staff Engineer - Observability

As a Staff Engineer in the Observability domain, you will act as the technical North Star driving the long-term evolution of our global telemetry and monitoring ecosystem. Our platform is at a pivotal turning point: we are transitioning from a traditional observability platform toward an intelligent, proactive companion that leverages automation to drastically reduce cognitive load and incident resolution times.

In this role, you will bridge the gap between our high-scale telemetry infrastructure (managing thousands of hybrid bare-metal and Kubernetes environments),our developer-facing software pipelines (processing billions of daily events), and observability experience in alerting and visualization. You will play a defining role in shaping and executing our strategic roadmap focused on Intelligent Observability, Unified Data Foundation, and Zero-Friction Configuration.

What you'll do

• Drive Strategic Architecture: Architect and execute the technical strategy for our unified, global observability platform, aligning long-term product vision with resilient, highly scalable engineering designs.
• Scale the Data Foundation: Lead the architectural revamp of our petabyte-scale search, logging, and metrics systems. You will guide the transition from legacy, over-extended datastores to highly optimized, regionalized, and multi-tenant telemetry pipelines.
• Enable Intelligent Observability: Architect the APIs, secure interfaces, and integration protocols that connect our unified data foundation to autonomous AI agents, enabling real-time diagnostics and conversational query tools.
• Establish Resilient Topologies: Deconstruct monolithic monitoring setups into isolated, high-availability regional architectures to minimize blast radiuses and ensure global operational stability.
• Simplify Developer Experience: Collaborate with product and engineering teams to design self-service developer tooling, leveraging GitOps-driven configuration models, automated schema enforcement, and intuitive quota and retention management.
• Technical Leadership & Guidance: Provide high-level technical direction across the observability domain, fostering engineering excellence, championing robust design reviews, and guiding engineers through complex distributed systems challenges.
• Advocate Company-Wide: Act as a technical advocate for the domain, partnering with engineering groups across Adyen to align telemetry capabilities with broader organizational needs, build and drive the adoption of developer-facing tools, and promote modern observability standards.

Who you are

• 10+ years of experience in software, systems, or platform engineering, including 3+ years in a similar technical leadership role within the observability or large-scale distributed data systems domain.
• Distributed Systems & Storage Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience designing, scaling, and operating core telemetry data engines (such as distributed search databases, time-series metrics systems, high-performance logging architectures) at a multi-petabyte scale.
• AI-Ready Telemetry Design: Practical understanding of how to structure, schema-enforce, and clean high-volume telemetry streams to make them highly optimized for consumption by LLMs, semantic search engines, and RAG pipelines.
• Telemetry Standardization: Experience adopting industry-standard telemetry collection frameworks (such as OpenTelemetry) and implementing SLO-driven alert governance.
• Software Engineering Mindset: Strong proficiency in software development (ideally in Go, Java, or Python) with a history of building production-grade, automated tooling and robust real-time data ingestion pipelines.
• Kubernetes & Infrastructure Fluency: Extensive experience operating and troubleshooting high-throughput workloads on production Kubernetes (both on-prem and cloud) alongside a solid understanding of system-level performance tuning (networking, storage, and operating system limits).
• Influence and Collaboration: Exceptional communication and system-design skills, with a proven ability to translate complex technical trade-offs for diverse stakeholders, align multiple engineering teams around a unified technical vision, andmentor and upskill engineers to elevate domain-wide technical execution.

Nice to have

• Agentic & LLM Integration: Experience building or utilizing open standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) to safely expose platform data (metrics, logs, traces) to external AI agents and SRE assistants.
• Intelligent Diagnostics: Experience designing or integrating automated anomaly detection, conversational AI querying interfaces (e.g., LLM co-pilots), or continuous profiling platforms.
• Governance at Scale: Familiarity with implementing automated multi-tenant isolation, capacity management, and cost-attribution frameworks for large-scale enterprise developer platforms.

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments

Our unique approach is a product of our diverse perspectives. This diversity of backgrounds and cultures is essential in helping us maintain our momentum. Our business and technical challenges are unique, and we need as many different voices as possible to join us in solving them - voices like yours. No matter who you are or where you're from, we welcome you to be your true self at Adyen.

Studies show that women and members of underrepresented communities apply for jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. Does this sound like you? If so, Adyen encourages you to reconsider and apply. We look forward to your application!

What's next?

Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days. Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role. Learn more about our hiring process here. Don't be afraid to let us know if you need more flexibility.

This role is based out of our Amsterdam office. We are an office-first company and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.