Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)

Responsibilities

• You will own the architecture of Affirm’s telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, query performance, and cost at 200+ TB/day.
• You will design log sampling strategies that significantly reduce volume and cost without losing the signal engineers need during incidents.
• You will shape how observability fits into agentic development, so that AI coding agents and code review catch instrumentation gaps before code ships.
• You will be responsible for setting technical strategy for your team on a year-long time scale, and help your team tie it together with critical, business-impacting projects.
• You will collaborate across teams in the product development lifecycle by collaborating with product management, design & analytics to ensure technical sustainability, risks and trade-offs are well understood and managed.
• You will act as a force-multiplier for your team through your definition and advocacy of technical solutions and operational processes.
• You take ownership of your team’s operations and availability by ensuring you have the right monitoring, triage rotations, playbooks, polcities, testing and alerting in place to support “keep the lights on” & on-call efforts.
• You will foster a culture of quality and ownership on your team by setting code review and design standards for your team, and advocating for them beyond your team through your writing and tech talks.
• You will help develop talent on your team by providing feedback and guidance, and leading by example.
• What We Look For

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