Zigsaw

Staff Software Engineer, Observability

Zigsaw

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: San FranciscoCaliforniaUnited States

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Salary

💰 $177,185 - $364,795 per year

Job Level

About the role

  • 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

Requirements

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
  • Product Mindset: 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
  • Distributed Systems Expertise: 7+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with deep understanding of consistency, availability, scalability, and failure modes
  • Data Engineering Skills: Strong background in building data pipelines, working with time-series databases, columnar storage, stream processing (Kafka, Flink, etc.), and data modeling at scale
  • Observability Domain Knowledge: Hands-on experience with modern observability tools and practices including metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling. Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar technologies
  • Programming Proficiency: Expert-level coding skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, or Scala with ability to write production-quality code
  • Systems Thinking: 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
  • Health insurance
  • 401(k) matching
  • Flexible work hours
  • Paid time off
  • Remote work options
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
data engineeringdistributed systemsdata pipelinestime-series databasesstream processingprogramming in Javaprogramming in Pythonprogramming in Goprogramming in Scalaobservability tools
Soft Skills
technical leadershipcross-functional collaborationproduct mindsetsystems thinkingstrong communication skills