Opportunity at
PinterestStaff Software Engineer, Observability
Pinterest operates a digital platform that helps millions of people worldwide discover creative ideas, plan projects, and find inspiration. The company seeks a Staff Software Engineer,…
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About This Role
Pinterest operates a digital platform that helps millions of people worldwide discover creative ideas, plan projects, and find inspiration. The company seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Observability to join its team on a full-time basis. This position requires working out of the office for in-person collaboration one to two times per quarter, and applicants can reside anywhere in the country. Relocation assistance is not offered for this role. In this…
Job Description
Pinterest operates a digital platform that helps millions of people worldwide discover creative ideas, plan projects, and find inspiration. The company seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Observability to join its team on a full-time basis.
This position requires working out of the office for in-person collaboration one to two times per quarter, and applicants can reside anywhere in the country. Relocation assistance is not offered for this role.
In this capacity, the professional will operate with a product-oriented mindset to create observability solutions that assist the engineering organization. Responsibilities include defining the observability roadmap, building distributed infrastructure for metrics, logs, and traces, developing data pipelines, and establishing organizational standards. The ideal candidate pairs deep technical knowledge in distributed systems and data engineering with customer-focused product delivery.
The position is eligible for equity and offers a base salary range of $177,185 to $364,795 USD for applicants based in the United States, with final compensation depending on factors such as location, travel, skills, and prior experience.
Responsibilities
- Design and execute the observability roadmap with a product-focused approach
- Architect and scale distributed observability infrastructure including logs, metrics, and traces
- Construct high-performance data storage and pipelines for real-time and historical telemetry analysis
- Establish organizational observability standards and patterns to facilitate service instrumentation
- Mentor engineers, lead architectural reviews, and guide technical choices related to system reliability and performance
- Collaborate across functions with product engineering, infrastructure, and site reliability engineering teams
- Evaluate and integrate cutting-edge tools and trends in observability
Requirements
- Minimum of 7 years of professional experience in designing and operating large-scale distributed systems
- Demonstrated background in building data pipelines, stream processing, columnar storage, time-series databases, and large-scale data modeling
- Hands-on practice with profiling, logging, metrics, tracing, and modern observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry
- Expert-level programming capabilities in languages such as Python, Java, Go, or Scala
- Familiarity with cloud-native technologies including Kubernetes and service meshes
- Ability to travel to the office for in-person collaboration one to two times per quarter
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience
- Prior contributions to open-source observability projects
- Experience applying machine learning or anomaly detection to observability scenarios
Core Skills
Benefits
- Eligible for equity
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the location and remote policy for this job?
This is a full-time position where applicants can be situated anywhere in the country. However, the role requires coming into the office for in-person collaboration one to two times per quarter.
Is relocation assistance provided?
No, this position is not eligible for relocation assistance.
What is the salary range for this position?
For US-based applicants, the base salary range is $177,185 to $364,795 USD. The final salary is determined by factors including location, travel, relevant prior experience, and specific skills, and the role is also eligible for equity.
What kind of technical background is required?
Candidates must have at least seven years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, expert-level coding skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, or Scala, and strong data engineering capabilities.
Sample Interview Questions
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