Senior Software Engineer, Observability

The role

You will build and operate highly scalable observability platforms for distributed systems. You will develop software and platform capabilities to help engineering teams monitor and troubleshoot services.

What you will do

• Build and operate highly scalable observability platforms covering metrics, logs, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, and service health.
• Develop reliable software and platform capabilities for service instrumentation, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• Establish and evolve observability standards including telemetry collection, instrumentation, alert quality, SLOs, SLIs, service ownership, and operational readiness.
• Improve incident detection, diagnosis, and response through actionable alerts, intelligent correlation, service dependency visibility, and effective runbooks.
• Build self-service tools and paved paths for observability adoption.
• Partner with application, infrastructure, SRE, security, and product teams.
• Improve scalability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency of observability systems.
• Participate in design reviews, technical planning, code reviews, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to a culture of ownership and operational excellence.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend programming language, such as Go, Java, Python, or Kotlin.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
• Practical experience with observability platforms and technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or equivalent solutions.
• Strong understanding of metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service-level indicators, service-level objectives, and incident management.
• Experience with cloud-native environments, Kubernetes, containers, and public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with infrastructure as code and automated software delivery, using tools such as Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong system design and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• An ownership mindset and a commitment to improving systems.

Nice to have

• Experience building observability platforms or internal developer platforms used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Loki, Tempo, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Kafka, or similar technologies.
• Experience designing high-volume telemetry ingestion, storage, querying, aggregation, and retention systems.
• Familiarity with SRE practices, including on-call operations, incident response, postmortems, runbooks, and error budgets.
• Experience with service meshes, Kubernetes operators, or large-scale microservice platforms.
• Contributions to observability, cloud infrastructure, reliability, or open-source projects.
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.

About the company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. It provides financial infrastructure spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.