About the role

Role Overview

Join Pinterest as a Staff Software Engineer (Observability) on the Observability team. You will design and build infrastructure and tools to provide visibility into Pinterest’s large-scale distributed systems, define and execute the observability roadmap, and establish organization-wide observability standards.

Key Missions

Design & build observability infrastructure and tools for large-scale distributed systems.
Define and execute the observability roadmap as a product: translate engineering needs into technical solutions.
Architect, build, and scale distributed observability covering metrics, logs, traces (and profiling) to handle massive volumes.

Responsibilities

Mentor engineers and lead architectural reviews.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams and influence stakeholders at all levels.
Establish and drive observability standards across the organization.
Drive adoption of internal platforms via documentation, developer advocacy, and strong usability.

Requirements

Observability domain knowledge: hands-on experience with metrics/logs/traces/profiling and modern observability practices.
- Familiarity with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana (or similar).
Data engineering skills: build data pipelines; work with time-series databases, columnar storage, and stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink); data modeling at scale.
Cloud-native architectures: Kubernetes, service mesh (or similar).
Distributed systems expertise: 7+ years designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with strong understanding of consistency, availability, scalability, and failure modes.
Product mindset: work backwards from user/customer needs, prioritize features, measure success, and iterate.
Programming proficiency: expert-level production coding in Java, Python, Go, or Scala.

Nice to Haves

Experience with machine learning/anomaly detection applied to observability.
Contributions to open-source observability projects.
Experience building observability platforms from the ground up or significantly scaling existing solutions.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering (or equivalent experience).

About Pinterest

Pinterest is a consumer internet company operating a visual discovery and social platform. It builds large-scale distributed systems and services, and this role focuses on observability infrastructure for monitoring, reliability, and performance across that ecosystem.

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