Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)

Location: Remote Canada. Remote-first work is available within the country of employment; occasional office attendance may be required, and all new hires attend in-person onboarding.

CAN base pay range per year: $181,000–$241,000.

Company

Affirm is a fintech company providing clear, predictable ways for people to pay over time without hidden fees.

What you will do

• Own the architecture of the telemetry pipeline handling 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 signal.
• Define how observability supports agentic development, AI coding agents, and code review.
• Set the team’s technical strategy and lead major, business-impacting cross-functional projects.
• Partner with product management, design, analytics, infrastructure, and product teams to manage sustainability, risks, and trade-offs.
• Mentor six engineers and establish standards for code review, design, operations, monitoring, testing, alerting, playbooks, and on-call support.

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, 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 and move between low-level language idioms and large-system architecture.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills for collaboration with a global engineering team, including experience gathering and iterating on peer feedback.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first work with flexibility within the country of employment; some roles may require occasional office attendance.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• 100% subsidized medical coverage, dental and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Monthly health, wellness, and technology spending stipends.
• Employee stock purchase plan and potential equity rewards.
• Inclusive interview process with accommodations available for candidates with disabilities.