Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)

Location: Remote US; most roles can be performed almost anywhere within the country of employment, with occasional in-person work and in-person onboarding.

Base pay: $230,000–$290,000 in CA, WA, NY, NJ, and CT; $204,000–$264,000 in all other U.S. states.

Company

Affirm provides transparent, predictable buy-now-pay-later payment products without hidden fees.

What you will do

• Own the architecture of the telemetry pipeline processing 200+ TB/day of metrics, logs, and traces across hundreds of services and 80+ Kubernetes clusters.
• Design log-sampling strategies that reduce volume and cost while preserving incident-relevant signals.
• Shape observability practices for agentic development and code review so AI-assisted code is instrumented by default.
• Define the team’s technical strategy and roadmap, lead cross-functional projects, and connect execution to business-impacting initiatives.
• Partner with product management, design, analytics, infrastructure, and product teams to manage sustainability, risks, and trade-offs.
• Set operational, code review, design, monitoring, testing, alerting, and on-call standards while mentoring six engineers and developing talent.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale, using languages such as Python or Kotlin.
• Extensive experience developing highly available distributed systems with technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Flink, and Kubernetes.
• Experience building or operating high-volume telemetry systems for metrics, logs, and/or traces using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Kafka, and Terraform.
• Strong understanding of modern observability practices, including structured and wide events, sampling, cardinality management, and SLOs.
• Experience driving adoption of platform standards across many engineering teams through tooling and engagement.
• 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 through ambiguity from low-level language idioms to large-system architecture.
• Demonstrated growth and impact through gathering and iterating on feedback from engineering and cross-functional peers.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills; equivalent practical experience or a Bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work with flexibility within the country of employment.
• 100% subsidized medical coverage for employees and dependents, plus dental and vision benefits.
• Monthly stipends for technology, health, and wellness expenses.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan with a discounted purchase option.
• Inclusive interview accommodations are available for candidates with disabilities.