Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)

About this role

Lead the technical direction and hands-on development of Affirm’s observability platform, which processes more than 200 TB of telemetry daily. Improve telemetry reliability, query performance, and cost while advancing wide events, log sampling, and instrumentation practices for AI-assisted development.

About the company

Affirm offers buy now, pay later financing that lets consumers split purchases into transparent installment payments at checkout. It partners with merchants to provide flexible credit options without late fees.

The team

Observability team, mentoring six engineers.

Stack

What you'll do

• Own the architecture of the high-volume telemetry pipeline.
• Design log-sampling strategies that reduce cost while preserving incident-debugging signal.
• Shape observability practices for AI coding agents and code review.
• Set technical strategy and lead business-impacting projects.
• Partner with product, infrastructure, and other teams on technical trade-offs.
• Improve team operations, monitoring, on-call processes, and service availability.
• Establish code review and design standards; mentor and develop engineers.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale.
• Experience building or operating highly available distributed systems.
• Experience with high-volume metrics, logs, or traces systems.
• Knowledge of structured and wide events, sampling, cardinality management, and SLOs.
• Experience driving platform-standard adoption across engineering teams.
• Ability to plan and deliver major features, system components, or deprecations.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Benefits

• 100% subsidized medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• Monthly technology, health, and wellness stipends.
• Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
• Employee stock purchase plan with discounted stock.