Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Observability)

Role overview Serve as the technical lead for a large-scale observability platform used by engineering teams to understand service behavior and investigate production issues. The role combines substantial hands-on backend engineering with long-range technical planning, cross-team delivery, and mentorship for a six-engineer team. The platform processes more than 200 TB of telemetry per day, and its roadmap includes richer request-level events, sampling, and improved instrumentation in AI-assisted development.

Responsibilities - Set the architecture and technical direction for telemetry ingestion, balancing availability, query speed, and operating cost at high volume. - Design log sampling approaches that reduce data volume while retaining the evidence engineers need for debugging and incident response. - Improve observability in AI-assisted coding and review so instrumentation gaps can be caught before release. - Plan and drive major platform work with product, infrastructure, analytics, and design partners, making risks and tradeoffs clear. - Own service health practices, including monitoring, alerting, on-call rotations, triage guidance, testing, and operational playbooks. - Establish engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, written guidance, and mentoring.

Requirements - Eight or more years designing and launching large-scale backend systems, with strong coding ability in languages such as Python or Kotlin. - Experience building or operating highly available distributed systems and high-volume telemetry pipelines. - Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, databases, stream processing, Kubernetes, and tools such as OpenTelemetry, Kafka, and Terraform. - A practical understanding of structured and wide events, sampling, cardinality management, and service level objectives. - Experience gaining adoption of platform standards across engineering teams and delivering significant system changes through a clear technical plan. - Strong written and verbal communication, sound judgment in ambiguous environments, and a related degree or equivalent practical experience.

Benefits and work setup Remote-first work within the country of employment, with an in-person onboarding experience and occasional office work for some roles. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision coverage, monthly technology and wellness stipends, flexible time off, holidays, and an employee stock purchase plan.