Hybrid Software Engineer, Observability

at Airtable

• Job title: Software Engineer, Observability
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: $196,000 - $270,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Distributed Systems, Grafana, Java, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Python, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, New York City, United States

About the role

• Software Engineer developing observability systems at Airtable. Designing and evolving logging, metrics, and tracing pipelines for reliability and performance.

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale core observability
• Lead the design and evolution of logging, metrics, and tracing pipelines to handle massive data volumes
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies (e.g., OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, ELK stack) that enhance Airtable’s observability posture
• Guide and mentor a growing team of infrastructure engineers; share best practices in distributed tracing, monitoring, and logging
• Define and uphold coding standards and operational excellence across the org
• Partner with Deploy Infrastructure, Service Orchestration, and Product teams to embed observability throughout the development lifecycle
• Align infrastructure decisions with business goals to detect issues before they impact customers
• Own end-to-end reliability for observability tools and establish SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets
• Optimize performance and cost of large-scale data pipelines and storage
• Shape the observability roadmap, prioritizing initiatives like improved tracing coverage, advanced monitoring dashboards, and next-gen logging pipelines
• Continuously explore emerging trends to keep Airtable’s monitoring capabilities at the cutting edge
• Extend observability to LLM and AI features
• Instrument prompts, model calls, and RAG pipelines to capture latency, reliability, cost, and safety signals
• Design online and offline evaluation loops for LLM quality, including canary analysis and drift detection
• Build dashboards and alerts for token usage, error rates, guardrail triggers, and model performance; connect these signals to tracing for prompt lineage
• Partner with AI and Product teams to define SLOs for AI features and close the feedback loop from incidents to model and prompt improvements

Requirements

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on observability, or infrastructure at scale.
• Demonstrated success implementing and running production-grade logging, metrics, or tracing systems.
• Proficiency in distributed systems concepts, data streaming pipelines, and container orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Deep hands-on knowledge of tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK Stack, Loki, or ClickHouse.
• Comfort with at least one programming language (e.g., Go, Python, Java) to build and maintain observability tooling.
• Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating across multiple teams.
• Strong communication skills to effectively present technical trade-offs and architectural plans.
• Eagerness to own high-impact initiatives from design through production and maintenance.
• Proven ability to balance short-term fixes with long-term strategic vision.
• A passion for enabling all of Airtable’s engineering organization through reliable, intuitive observability tools.
• Commitment to measuring success by the velocity and confidence with which product teams can ship.

Benefits

• comprehensive benefit offerings