Senior Software Engineer, Observability

Robinhood•Menlo Park, CA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

Robinhood is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead the technical direction of its Observability team and full-stack observability platform. The team builds and operates systems for metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and alerting that provide visibility into Robinhood’s infrastructure and help keep products and customer experiences reliable at scale. It partners with the Robinhood Command Center and engineering teams to support incident response and targets at least 99.9% uptime for observability systems. The successful candidate will shape the observability roadmap, own the observability control plane end-to-end, and make architectural decisions affecting reliability and operational health across the organization. The role leads and collaborates with six engineers, develops cost-efficient telemetry ingestion strategies, builds in-house solutions when existing tools are insufficient, and explores AI-driven approaches to advance full-stack observability. This role is based in Robinhood’s Menlo Park, California office, with in-person attendance expected at least three days per week. Compensation includes a location-based base pay range, bonus opportunities, equity, and benefits. The listed base pay ranges are $196,000–$230,000 for Zone 1, $172,000–$202,000 for Zone 2, and $153,000–$179,000 for Zone 3.

Requirements

At least 5 years of software engineering experience.
A proven track record of owning and delivering large-scale observability or infrastructure platform initiatives.
Deep expertise in Kubernetes and public cloud environments; AWS is preferred.
Ability to architect and operate distributed systems at scale, independent of specific vendor tooling.
Strong coding proficiency in one or more languages such as Go or Python.
Experience integrating observability agents, libraries, and instrumentation directly into production codebases.
Experience owning an observability control plane or telemetry pipeline in a high-traffic production environment, including ingestion cost management, cardinality control, and signal routing.

Nice To Haves

Experience with the Vector data pipeline or equivalent high-throughput log and metrics routing tools.
Familiarity with Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, Humio, or Sentry.

Responsibilities

Define and execute the full-stack observability roadmap, establishing technical direction for metrics, logs, traces, and alerting infrastructure.
Own and evolve the observability control plane, including telemetry ingestion pipelines, cost management strategies, and tooling for high availability.
Lead and collaborate with a team of six engineers to build scalable, self-service observability solutions.
Establish and maintain SLOs for observability systems that meet or exceed the 99.9% uptime target.
Partner with the Robinhood Command Center and engineering teams on dependency mapping, incident response workflows, and observability standards.