Staff Software Engineer, Observability

Robinhood; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 210,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity ownership

401(k) matching

Health insurance for employees

Job summary

Robinhood is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Observability team in Menlo Park, CA. You will lead the roadmap for full-stack observability, own the control plane end-to-end, and drive architectural decisions for reliability at scale.

You will guide a team of six engineers, optimize telemetry ingestion costs, and explore AI-driven approaches to accelerate progress toward full-stack observability. This high-ownership, high-visibility role requires deep Kubernetes and cloud experience (AWS

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with observability or infrastructure platform leadership.
• Proven ability to design and operate large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep Kubernetes and cloud experience (AWS preferred).
• Strong coding skills in Go or Python and production instrumentation experience.
• Experience owning an observability control plane or telemetry pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the full-stack observability roadmap across metrics, logs, traces, and alerting.
• Own the observability control plane, telemetry ingestion, and cost management strategies.
• Lead a team of engineers to build scalable, self-service observability solutions.
• Set and maintain SLOs for 99.9% uptime of observability systems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align on dependencies and incident workflows.

Skills

Kubernetes

Go

Python

Observability

Telemetry pipelines

Distributed systems

Cloud AWS

Prometheus

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Honeycomb

Humio

Sentry

Vector

Job description

Join us in building the future of finance.

Our mission is to democratize finance for all. An estimated $124 trillion of assets will be inherited by younger generations in the next two decades. The largest transfer of wealth in human history. If you’re ready to be at the epicenter of this historic cultural and financial shift, keep reading.

We are building an elite team, applying frontier technologies to the world's biggest financial problems. We're looking for bold thinkers. Sharp problem-solvers. Builders who are wired to make an impact. Robinhood isn't a place for complacency, it's where ambitious people do the best work of their careers. We're a high-performing, fast-moving team with ethics at the center of everything we do. Expectations are high, and so are the rewards.

The Observability team's mission is to build and own Robinhood's full-stack observability platform — the foundation that keeps every product, service, and customer experience running reliably at scale. We design and operate the systems that give engineers deep visibility into how Robinhood's infrastructure behaves, ensuring that when something goes wrong, the right people know immediately and can act fast. Our work spans metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and alerting pipelines, and we partner closely with the Robinhood Command Center to ensure our observability systems meet or exceed 99.9% uptime. We believe in monitoring our own monitors — the observability infrastructure is a product, not just a tool.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Observability team, you will be the technical lead shaping the roadmap for how Robinhood observes itself at scale. You will own the observability control plane end-to-end, making architectural decisions that directly impact the reliability and operational health of Robinhood's entire product surface. You'll lead a team of six engineers, drive the strategy for cost-efficient telemetry ingestion, build in-house solutions where off-the-shelf tooling falls short, and integrate AI-driven approaches to accelerate progress toward full-stack observability. This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role where your technical decisions set the direction for the entire organization!

This role is based in our Menlo Park, CA office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week.

At Robinhood, we believe in the power of in-person work to accelerate progress, spark innovation, and strengthen community. Our office experience is intentional, energizing, and designed to fully support high-performing teams.

What you’ll do

• Define and execute the full-stack observability roadmap, establishing a clear technical vision for metrics, logs, traces, and alerting infrastructure across Robinhood's engineering organization.
• Own and evolve the observability control plane, including telemetry ingestion pipelines, cost management strategies, and the tooling that ensures observability components remain highly available.
• Lead and collaborate with a team of six engineers to build scalable, self-service observability solutions that enable product and infrastructure teams to move faster with greater confidence.
• Establish and maintain SLOs for observability systems that meet or exceed Robinhood's 99.9% uptime target, ensuring the observability platform is as reliable as the services it monitors.
• Partner with the Robinhood Command Center and engineering teams across the organization to align on dependency mapping, incident response workflows, and observability standards.

What you bring

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of owning and delivering large-scale observability or infrastructure platform initiatives.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes and public cloud environments (AWS preferred), with the ability to architect and operate distributed systems at scale regardless of specific vendor tooling.
• Strong coding proficiency in one or more languages (Go, Python, or similar) with experience integrating observability agents, libraries, and instrumentation directly into production codebases.
• Demonstrated experience owning an observability control plane or telemetry pipeline — including ingestion cost management, cardinality control, and signal routing — in a high-traffic production environment.
• Experience with the Vector data pipeline (or equivalent high-throughput log/metrics routing tools) and familiarity with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, Humio, or Sentry is a plus.

What we offer

• Challenging, high-impact work to grow your career
• Performance driven compensation with multipliers for outsized impact, bonus programs, equity ownership, and 401(k) matching
• Top Tier benefits to fuel your work, including 100% paid health insurance for employees with 90% coverage for dependents
• Access to the best AI tools on the market and continuous AI skill-building for every employee, technical or not
• Lifestyle wallet - a highly flexible benefits spending account for wellness, learning, and more
• Employer-paid life & disability insurance, fertility benefits, and mental health benefits
• Time off to recharge including company holidays, paid time off, sick time, parental leave, and more!
• Exceptional office experience with catered meals, events, and comfortable workspaces.

Equal Employment Opportunity Information

At Robinhood, we care deeply about diverse representation in our workforce as it supports our mission to democratize finance for all. In support of this goal, we encourage applicants to voluntarily identify demographic information. This information helps us to continue building a more inclusive workplace and to ensure effective recruiting programs that are inclusive of individuals across all backgrounds.

Self-identifying in this section is completely voluntary and if you choose not to provide any information, please select the “I don't wish to answer” option under that question. Whatever your decision, data that you provide in this section will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Individuals seeking employment at Robinhood are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, neurodivergence, veteran status, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by law.

You are being given the opportunity to provide the following information in order to comply with federal and state Equal Employment Opportunity recordkeeping, reporting, and other legal requirements, and to be used in our efforts to recruit a diverse workforce. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential manner. For more information on EEOC definitions, please reference this document .