[Remote] Staff Software Engineer, Observability

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pinterest is a platform that inspires creativity and helps users plan memorable experiences. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Observability team, responsible for designing and building infrastructure and tools that provide visibility into large-scale distributed systems, enabling engineers to understand and optimize their services.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the observability roadmap, treating it as a product. Understand engineering team needs and translate them into technical solutions with measurable impact
• Architect, build, and scale distributed observability infrastructure (metrics, logs, traces) to handle massive volumes across Pinterest's distributed systems
• Build high-performance data pipelines and storage for real-time and historical telemetry analysis at Pinterest scale
• Champion Best Practices: Establish observability standards and patterns across the organization, making it easy for teams to instrument their services and gain actionable insights
• Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers, lead architectural reviews, and influence technical decisions across teams to improve overall system reliability and performance
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with SRE, Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and other teams to understand pain points and deliver solutions that improve developer productivity and system reliability
• Innovation: Stay current with observability trends and technologies, evaluating and adopting cutting-edge tools and techniques to keep Pinterest at the forefront

Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Demonstrated ability to work backwards from customer needs —understanding user needs, prioritizing features, measuring success, and iterating based on feedback. Experience building internal platforms or tools with strong adoption
• 7+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with deep understanding of consistency, availability, scalability, and failure modes
• Strong background in building data pipelines, working with time-series databases, columnar storage, stream processing (Kafka, Flink, etc.), and data modeling at scale
• Hands-on experience with modern observability tools and practices including metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling. Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar technologies
• Expert-level coding skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, or Scala with ability to write production-quality code
• Ability to see the big picture while managing complex technical details, balancing trade-offs between cost, performance, and reliability
• Experience building observability platforms from the ground up or significantly scaling existing solutions
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and technologies (Kubernetes, service mesh, etc.)
• Track record of driving adoption of internal platforms through excellent documentation, UX, and developer advocacy
• Experience with machine learning or anomaly detection applied to observability use cases
• Strong communication skills with ability to influence stakeholders at all levels
• Contributions to open-source observability projects, a plus

Benefits

• The position is also eligible for equity.
• Information regarding the culture at Pinterest and benefits available for this position can be found here.

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