Staff Software Engineer, Backend – Observability

Posted 12 hours ago

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About the role

  • Staff Backend Engineer leading telemetry architecture and observability at Affirm, a buy-now-pay-later company. Improving distributed-system reliability, cost efficiency and AI-assisted development practices.

Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture of Affirm’s telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, query performance and cost at 200+ TB/day
  • Design log-sampling strategies that reduce volume and cost while preserving incident-response signal
  • Shape observability practices for agentic development, AI coding agents and code review
  • Set technical strategy for the team on a year-long horizon
  • Drive cross-functional projects with product management, design and analytics
  • Define and advocate for technical solutions and operational processes
  • Own team operations and availability, including monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, policies, testing, alerting and on-call efforts
  • Establish code-review and design standards
  • Foster team quality and ownership through writing and tech talks
  • Mentor and develop a team of six engineers
  • Define roadmap and partner with infrastructure and product teams

Requirements

  • 8+ years of experience designing, developing and launching backend systems at scale
  • Experience using languages such as Python or Kotlin
  • Extensive experience developing highly available distributed systems
  • Experience with AWS, MySQL, Flink and Kubernetes
  • Experience building or operating high-volume telemetry systems using OpenTelemetry, Kafka and Terraform
  • Knowledge of modern observability practices, including structured and wide events, sampling, cardinality management and SLOs
  • Experience driving adoption of platform standards across many engineering teams
  • Experience delivering major features or system components, or deprecating existing functionality, through technical and execution planning
  • Ability to write high-quality, maintainable code
  • Ability to work across low-level language idioms and large-system architecture
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills
  • Ability to collaborate with a global engineering team

Benefits

  • Monthly stipends for health, wellness and tech spending
  • 100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and dependents
  • Dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents
  • Flexible time off
  • Generous holiday calendars
  • Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) allowing employees to buy Affirm stock at a discount
  • Inclusive interview process and disability accommodations
  • In-person onboarding experience for all new hires

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Lead

Salary

CA$181,000 - CA$241,000 per year

Degree requirement

No Education Requirement

Tech skills

AWSDistributed SystemsKafkaKotlinKubernetesMySQLPythonTerraform

Location requirements

RemoteCanada

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