Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Job Summary

As the technical lead for Observability, the full-time Staff Software Engineer, Backend will own the architecture of Affirm's telemetry pipeline, design log sampling strategies, and mentor a team of engineers while collaborating across product and infrastructure teams in a remote work environment.

Key responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, query performance, and cost
• Design log sampling strategies to reduce volume and cost while maintaining essential signals during incidents
• Shape observability practices within agentic development, ensuring code is well-instrumented before deployment

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in designing, developing, and launching scalable backend systems using languages like Python or Kotlin
• Extensive experience with high-availability distributed systems and technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Flink, and Kubernetes
• Proven track record in building or operating high-volume telemetry systems utilizing OpenTelemetry, Kafka, and Terraform
• Strong understanding of modern observability practices including structured events, sampling, and SLOs
• Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience