Senior Software Engineer, Observability

About the role

CLEAR is building THE secure identity company of the future. Our mission is to make experiences safer and easier—physically and digitally. With more than 43 million Members and a growing network of partners across the world, CLEAR's secure identity platform is transforming the way people live, work, and travel. Whether it’s at the airport, stadium, or throughout your everyday life, CLEAR unlocks the magic of frictionless experiences. Today, CLEAR is well-known as a leader in digital and biometric identification, reducing friction for our members wherever an ID check is needed. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to establish our Observability framework and foundations. You will join us to accelerate building and scaling our innovative systems that support our growing identity platform. You will drive on Observability best practices to find and fix gaps in our observability and our overall systems. You will also lead practices such as load testing, capacity planning, game days, chaos testing, and incident post-mortems.

Responsibilities

• Embed within the Engineering pillar to deeply understand the product and implement observability across all key flows
• Facilitate and build load testing cases, ensuring we understand the limits and scaling factors of our services and systems
• Contribute to observability and support the design of new services and systems, ensuring highly reliable and scalable concepts are implemented
• Build and lead practices such as game days, chaos engineering, and failure analysis
• Build long-term capacity plans, with an eye toward reliability and cost-efficiency

Requirements

• 6+ years experience writing production-grade software in a modern language, such as Java and Python
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems concepts (think CAP theorem), microservices architecture, and distributed tracing
• Experience with modern observability systems such as Datadog
• Experience with performance debugging tools and patterns; able to read a flame graph
• A strong product and user‑centric mindset
• Desire to continuously improve systems and environments
• A demonstrated history of owning complex, cross‑functional projects and driving them from idea to production with a bias for action
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts and influence both technical and non‑technical stakeholders
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments, making thoughtful tradeoffs, and independently driving work forward
• A collaborative mindset with a passion for mentoring others, continuously improving engineering practices, and building products that deliver measurable customer and business impact

Benefits

• Catered lunches every day
• Fully stocked kitchens
• Stipends and reimbursement programs for well‑being and learning & development
• Holistic total rewards, including comprehensive healthcare plans
• Family‑building benefits (fertility and adoption/surrogacy support)
• Flexible time off
• Annual wellness stipend
• Free OneMedical memberships for you and your dependents
• CLEAR Plus membership
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match

Pay

The total compensation range for this role is $225,000 – $300,000, depending on levels of skills and experience. This range represents the combined base salary, annual bonus incentive, and new hire equity package (in Restricted Stock Units). Additionally, this role will be eligible for refresh equity grants as part of CLEAR’s ongoing compensation program. Actual compensation will vary based on factors including, but not limited to, location, education, skills, experience, and performance.