Staff Observability Engineer: Scale & Insight

Pinterest; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 177,000 - 365,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Remote-friendly policy

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Observability team to design and build the infrastructure that gives visibility into our large-scale systems. You’ll shape the observability roadmap, partner with SRE and Product Eng, and guide the implementation of metrics, logs, and traces to improve reliability.

You will mentor engineers, lead architectural reviews, and drive adoption of internal platforms, tooling, and best practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Product mindset with internal platforms or tools experience and adoption impact.
• 7+ years designing/operating large-scale distributed systems with high availability.
• Strong data pipelines, time-series DBs, streaming (Kafka, Flink) and data modeling at scale.
• Observability: metrics, logs, traces; open-source tooling knowledge (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Expert coding in Java, Python, Go, or Scala for production systems.
• System thinking with cost/performance/reliability trade-offs.
• Experience building/ Scaling observability platforms; cloud-native (Kubernetes).
• Documentation, UX, and developer advocacy to drive adoption.
• ML or anomaly detection in observability is a plus.
• Strong communication; open-source contributions are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the observability roadmap treated as a product with measurable impact.
• Architect, build, and scale distributed observability infra (metrics/logs/traces) for large systems.
• Build high-performance data pipelines/storage for real-time and historical telemetry.
• Establish observability standards and patterns for teams to instrument services.
• Mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and influence technical decisions.
• Collaborate with SRE, Infra, and Product Eng to improve reliability and developer productivity.
• Stay current with trends and adopt cutting-edge tools to keep Pinterest at the forefront.

Skills

Distributed systems

Data engineering

Java

Python

Go

Scala

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Cloud-native

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Kafka

Flink

Kubernetes

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Observability team to design and build the infrastructure that gives visibility into our large-scale systems. You’ll shape the observability roadmap, partner with SRE and Product Eng, and guide the implementation of metrics, logs, and traces to improve reliability.

You will mentor engineers, lead architectural reviews, and drive adoption of internal platforms, tooling, and best practices.