Affirm
Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)
$204K–$290K
Remote US · Remote · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 28, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Leads the technical direction and hands-on development of Affirm’s observability platform, including its high-volume telemetry pipeline and AI-assisted instrumentation practices.
What you'll do
- Own telemetry pipeline architecture and design log-sampling strategies to balance reliability, query performance, signal quality, and cost.
- Set technical strategy, lead cross-functional projects, and establish operational practices and standards for the team.
- Mentor six engineers and shape how observability and instrumentation checks are integrated into agentic development and code review.
What they ask for
- 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages such as Python or Kotlin.
- Track record developing highly available distributed systems and building or operating high-volume telemetry systems.
- Experience driving adoption of platform standards across engineering teams and delivering major system features or changes through technical and execution plans.
- Knowledge of modern observability practices, including structured and wide events, sampling, cardinality management, and SLOs.
Pay
USD $230,000 - $290,000 base salary (CA, WA, NY, NJ, CT); USD $204,000 - $264,000 base salary (all other U.S. states)
Tools
Python, Kotlin, AWS, MySQL, Flink, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Kafka
AI focus
Integrates observability into agentic development so AI coding agents and code review can detect instrumentation gaps before code ships.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative