Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)

<div class="content-intro"><p>At Affirm, we exist for the moments that matter—giving people a clear, predictable way to pay over time, with no hidden fees, no surprises, and no tradeoffs on what matters most.</p></div><p data-pm-slice="1 1 []">The Observability team builds the platform every Affirm engineer relies on to understand the behavior and performance of our systems. Our platform ingests 200+ TB/day of metrics, logs, and traces from hundreds of services across 80+ Kubernetes clusters, and when a user's checkout fails, our data is how engineers find out why. Over the next year, we’re moving to wide events, with one context-rich event per request, improving the signal-to-noise ratio to make debugging faster. We’re also introducing log sampling and building observability best practices into agentic development and code review, so that AI-assisted code is well instrumented by default.</p> <p>We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to be the technical lead for Observability. You’ll spend most of your time hands-on while defining the roadmap, driving cross-functional projects, mentoring a team of six engineers, and partnering closely with infrastructure and product teams.<br><br><br><strong>What You'll Do</strong><br><br>· You will own the architecture of Affirm’s telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, query performance, and cost at 200+ TB/day.<br>· You will design log sampling strategies that significantly reduce volume and cost without losing the signal engineers