Senior Software Engineer, Observability

Airtable•San Francisco, CA

40d

About The Position

Airtable is the leading no-code platform empowering teams globally to design and automate workflows. More than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, rely on Airtable to accelerate critical business processes. Observability at Airtable ensures that our engineers have the tools they need to measure performance, monitor reliability, and debug issues in real time. Our mission is to provide actionable insights into errors and crashes, fueling a better and more reliable experience for millions of users. We build logging, metrics, and tracing systems that are leveraged by nearly every engineering team at Airtable. If you're excited about building resilient systems at scale, empowering engineers with best-in-class observability, and shaping the future of Airtable's infrastructure, we'd love to hear from you.

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.

Responsibilities

Architect and Scale Observability Systems
Lead the design and evolution of our 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 deeply into Airtable's development lifecycle.
Align infrastructure decisions with business goals, ensuring proactive detection of issues before they impact customers.
Own end-to-end reliability for observability tools-establish SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets.
Optimize the performance and cost-effectiveness of large-scale data pipelines and storage.
Shape the observability roadmap-prioritizing high-impact initiatives like improved tracing coverage, advanced monitoring dashboards, or next-gen logging pipelines.
Continuously explore emerging trends to keep Airtable's monitoring capabilities at the cutting edge.