Hybrid Staff Software Engineer, Observability

at Zigsaw

• Job title: Staff Software Engineer, Observability
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: $177,185 - $364,795 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Cloud, Distributed Systems, Grafana, Java, Kafka, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Python, Scala, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, San Francisco, United States

About the role

• Staff Software Engineer developing observability infrastructure and tools for Pinterest. Collaborating with engineering teams to enhance service visibility and system reliability.

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

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