Software Engineer, Observability

Gusto’s Reliability Engineering team is looking for a Staff Observability Engineer to shape observability standards, build and evolve the observability platform, and drive reliability automation.

• Shape the engineering organization standards around observability.
• Own and evolve the observability platform, including distributed logging, metrics, and tracing infrastructure.
• Build AI‑native capabilities to automatically detect anomalies, diagnose failures, and accelerate root cause analysis.
• Create powerful developer experiences through dashboards, notebooks, and interactive debugging tools.
• Drive reliability automation with intelligent alerting, diagnostics, and incident response systems.
• Partner across engineering teams to embed observability and reliability best practices.
• Mentor engineers and influence reliability culture across the organization.

• Strategic systems thinker who identifies high impact opportunities and builds scalable solutions.
• Experience operating large‑scale distributed systems in production, especially logging platforms or time series databases.
• Strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure such as Kubernetes and AWS.
• Thrives in ambiguous environments and rolls up sleeves to solve unscoped problems end to end.
• Product mindset or full‑stack instincts and excitement to build real tools engineers love to use.
• Strong communicator who can align technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Bonus if built or contributed to observability ecosystems such as Open Telemetry or Prometheus.

• Have 8+ years of relevant industry experience building and operating large‑scale observability or monitoring infrastructure.
• Experience implementing or operating observability platforms such as Datadog, Sentry, Splunk, or similar.
• Have strong SWE coding proficiency in at least one of Ruby, Python, or Type Script.

• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred).
• Infrastructure‑as‑Code experience such as Terraform or Crossplane.
• Container orchestration experience such as Kubernetes.
• Linux systems knowledge and shell proficiency.
• Experience designing highly available and scalable systems.
• Experience acting as an internal consultant or trusted advisor.

Compensation:
Targeted at $200,000‑$230,000/yr in Denver and most remote locations, and $230,000‑$270,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Final offers vary based on experience and expertise.

Employees based in Denver, San Francisco—or New York City—will be expected to work from the office approximately 2‑3 days per week, subject to role. Remote employees must have a reliable internet connection.

Gusto is proud to be an equal‑opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state, and local law.

Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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