Software Engineer, Observability

About Pinterest

Millions of people around the world come to our platform to find creative ideas, dream about new possibilities and plan for memories that will last a lifetime. At Pinterest, we’re on a mission to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love, and that starts with the people behind the product.

Discover a career where you ignite innovation for millions, transform passion into growth opportunities, celebrate each other’s unique experiences and embrace the flexibility to do your best work. Creating a career you love? It’s Possible.

At Pinterest, AI isn't just a feature, it's a powerful partner that augments our creativity and amplifies our impact, and we’re looking for candidates who are excited to be a part of that. To get a complete picture of your experience and abilities, we’ll explore your foundational skills and how you collaborate with AI.

Through our interview process, what matters most is that you can always explain your approach, showing us not just what you know, but how you think. You can read more about our AI interview philosophy and how we use AI in our recruiting process here.

• Define and execute the observability roadmap, treating it as a product. Understand engineering team needs and translate them into technical solutions with measurable impact
• Architect, build, and scale distributed observability infrastructure (metrics, logs, traces) to handle massive volumes across Pinterest's distributed systems
• Build high-performance data pipelines and storage for real-time and historical telemetry analysis at Pinterest scale
• Champion Best Practices:
  Establish observability standards and patterns across the organization, making it easy for teams to instrument their services and gain actionable insights
• Technical Leadership:
  Mentor engineers, lead architectural reviews, and influence technical decisions across teams to improve overall system reliability and performance
• Cross-functional Collaboration:
  
  Partner with SRE, Infrastructure, Product Engineering, and other teams to understand pain points and deliver solutions that improve developer productivity and system reliability
• Innovation:
  Stay current with observability trends and technologies, evaluating and adopting cutting-edge tools and techniques to keep Pinterest at the forefront

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Product Mindset:
  Demonstrated ability to work backwards from customer needs —understanding user needs, prioritizing features, measuring success, and iterating based on feedback. Experience building internal platforms or tools with strong adoption
• Distributed Systems Expertise: 7+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems with deep understanding of consistency, availability, scalability, and failure modes
• Data Engineering
  
  Skills:
  
  Strong background in building data pipelines, working with time-series databases, columnar storage, stream processing (Kafka, Flink, etc.), and data modeling at scale
• Observability Domain Knowledge:
  Hands‑on experience with modern observability tools and practices including metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling. Familiarity with Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar technologies
• Programming Proficiency:
  Expert‑level coding skills in languages like Java, Python, Go, or Scala with ability to write production-quality code
• Systems Thinking:
  Ability to see the big picture while managing complex technical details, balancing trade‑offs between cost, performance, and reliability
• Experience building observability platforms from the ground up or significantly scaling existing solutions
• Familiarity with cloud‑native architectures and technologies (Kubernetes, service mesh, etc.)
• Track record of driving adoption of internal platforms through excellent documentation, UX, and developer advocacy
• Experience with machine learning or anomaly detection applied to observability use cases
• Strong communication skills with ability to influence stakeholders at all levels
• Contributions to open‑source observability projects, a plus

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