Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)

Role overview Lead the technical direction of a backend observability platform used by engineering teams to understand system behavior and troubleshoot incidents. The platform handles more than 200 TB of metrics, logs, and traces each day across hundreds of services and many Kubernetes clusters. This hands-on staff role combines architecture and delivery with roadmap ownership, cross-team work, and mentorship of a six-engineer team.

Responsibilities - Own the telemetry pipeline architecture, balancing availability, query speed, and operating cost at high data volumes. - Design log sampling that reduces data volume while preserving useful incident signals. - Improve instrumentation practices, including support for context-rich events and checks that help coding agents and reviewers identify gaps. - Set the team’s technical strategy and guide delivery of significant, business-critical projects. - Partner with product, design, analytics, and infrastructure teams to manage technical trade-offs and sustainability. - Establish operational practices for monitoring, on-call response, triage, playbooks, testing, and alerting. - Set engineering standards, contribute to code and design reviews, and mentor team members.

Requirements - At least eight years designing, building, and launching large-scale backend systems, with experience in languages such as Python or Kotlin. - Strong experience building or operating highly available distributed systems. - Experience with high-volume telemetry platforms covering metrics, logs, or traces. - Familiarity with modern observability approaches such as structured events, sampling, cardinality management, and service-level objectives. - Track record of driving shared platform standards across engineering teams through tools and collaboration. - Ability to lead technical plans and major system changes, write clear, maintainable code, and work across levels of abstraction. - Strong written and verbal communication, and experience incorporating feedback from engineering and cross-functional partners.

Nice to have - Experience with cloud infrastructure and tools such as AWS, MySQL, Flink, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Kafka, or Terraform.

Benefits and work setup - Remote role for residents of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, or Saskatchewan, Canada. - Annual base pay range: CAD $181,000–$241,000; placement depends on location, experience, and relevant skills. Compensation may also include equity and monthly health, wellness, and technology stipends. - Medical, dental, and vision premiums are covered for employees and dependants. Other listed benefits include flexible time off, holiday allowances, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan.