Responsibilities

Own the architecture of Affirm’s telemetry pipeline, balancing reliability, query performance, and cost at 200+ TB per day.

Design log-sampling strategies that reduce volume and cost while preserving incident-response signal.

Shape observability practices for agentic development, AI coding agents, and code review.

Define the team’s technical strategy and roadmap and lead major cross-functional projects.

Mentor six engineers, develop talent, and provide technical guidance and feedback.

Establish code review, design, monitoring, triage, playbook, testing, alerting, and on-call standards.

Drive adoption of observability platform standards across engineering teams through tooling and engagement.

Collaborate with product management, design, analytics, infrastructure, and product teams on technical trade-offs and sustainability.

Requirements

- 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and launching backend systems at scale using languages such as Python or Kotlin.
- Extensive experience developing highly available distributed systems with technologies such as AWS, MySQL, Flink, and Kubernetes.
- Experience building or operating high-volume telemetry systems using technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Kafka, and Terraform.




- Strong knowledge of observability practices including structured and wide events, sampling, cardinality management, and SLOs.
- Experience driving adoption of platform standards across many engineering teams through tooling and engagement.
- Experience defining technical and execution plans for major features, system components, or deprecations.
- Ability to write high-quality, understandable, reusable code and work from low-level language details through large-system architecture.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills and a demonstrated track record of incorporating feedback.

Benefits

- Remote-first work arrangement with flexibility to work from almost anywhere within the country of employment; occasional office work may be required and all recent hires attend in-person onboarding.
- 100% subsidized medical coverage, including coverage for employees and dependents, plus dental and vision benefits.
- Monthly technology, health, and wellness spending stipends.
- Flexible time off and generous holiday calendars.
- Employee stock purchase plan with a discount.
- Inclusive interview process with accommodations available for candidates with disabilities.

📌 Staff Software Backend Engineer - Remote (Canada)
🏢 Affirm
📍 Canada