Observability Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems (Mandarin required

About The Role

Our client is a rapidly scaling global consumer internet platform serving hundreds of millions of users across content, community, e-commerce, and advertising ecosystems. As the company expands internationally and deepens its investment in AI-driven infrastructure, observability is a critical backbone for platform reliability and performance. We are seeking a backend engineer with deep hands-on experience building observability systems at scale—not simply operating monitoring tools.

• Palo Alto, California
• 5 Days onsite

Our client is a rapidly scaling global consumer internet platform serving hundreds of millions of users across content, community, e-commerce, and advertising ecosystems. As the company expands internationally and deepens its investment in AI-driven infrastructure, observability is a critical backbone for platform reliability and performance. We are seeking a backend engineer with deep hands-on experience building observability systems at scale—not simply operating monitoring tools.

You will help design and build next-generation observability infrastructure spanning metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling, supporting large-scale distributed systems as well as emerging AI infrastructure and AI-native workloads.

• Build and evolve large-scale observability systems across metrics, logging, tracing, and profiling.
• Design and develop monitoring platforms, distributed tracing systems, logging services, real-time alerting systems, and computation engines for streaming analytics and time-series workloads.
• Own architecture design and product-level implementation of core observability capabilities.
• Build systems designed for high throughput, high concurrency, low latency, high availability, and reliability at significant scale.
• Develop and improve service governance and observability capabilities across large-scale distributed and microservices environments.
• Work with cloud-native observability technologies such as Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, ELK, Click House, Sky Walking, CAT, and eBPF.
• Drive AI infrastructure observability, AI application observability, and 'Observability + AI' capabilities.
• Improve incident detection, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and overall platform stability through better telemetry and observability infrastructure.

• 2
  -7 years of relevant backend engineering, infrastructure, or observability experience.
• Strong backend software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Java or Go.
• Deep hands-on experience building observability, telemetry, monitoring, or reliability platforms—ideally at large scale.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, concurrent programming, performance optimization, and high-concurrency system design.
• Practical experience with one or more of Open Telemetry, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, ELK, Click House, Sky Walking, CAT, or eBPF.
• Good understanding of Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Strong foundational knowledge of Linux, networking, storage systems, and message queues.
• Experience designing systems for high throughput, high availability, low latency, and large telemetry/data volumes.
• Strong coding ability, ownership, and ability to solve complex infrastructure problems end-to-end.

• Fluent Mandarin Chinese is mandatory for this position.
• Candidates must be able to communicate effectively in Mandarin with engineering and product teams in China, while also being comfortable working in an English-speaking global engineering environment.

• Experience building observability infrastructure for very large-scale consumer internet or distributed systems environments.
• Experience with AI infrastructure observability or AI application observability.
• Familiarity with AI-related technologies or ecosystems such as PyTorch, Spring AI, or Langfuse.
• Experience with cross-region or global infrastructure and international platform environments.
• Open-source contributions in observability, infrastructure, or distributed systems.

• Palo Alto, California only.
• H-1B transfers can be supported for eligible US candidates.
• Green Card sponsorship/support can also be provided.

• Build foundational observability infrastructure supporting a global consumer platform with hundreds of millions of users.
• Work at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud-native observability, and AI infrastructure.
• Solve engineering problems involving massive telemetry volumes, high concurrency, performance, reliability, and global-scale infrastructure.
• Shape next-generation observability platforms rather than simply consuming existing monitoring tools.
• Gain direct exposure to AI observability—an emerging and highly specialized infrastructure domain.