Staff Software Engineer, Observability

About the role

The Staff Software Engineer on the Observability team at Robinhood is responsible for defining and executing the full-stack observability roadmap, owning and evolving the observability control plane, leading a team of six engineers, and partnering with the Robinhood Command Center and engineering teams across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the full-stack observability roadmap, establishing a clear technical vision for metrics, logs, traces, and alerting infrastructure across Robinhood's engineering organization.
• Own and evolve the observability control plane, including telemetry ingestion pipelines, cost management strategies, and the tooling that ensures observability components remain highly available.
• Lead and collaborate with a team of six engineers to build scalable, self-service observability solutions that enable product and infrastructure teams to move faster with greater confidence.
• Establish and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for observability systems that meet or exceed Robinhood's 99.9% uptime target, ensuring the observability platform is as reliable as the services it monitors.
• Partner with the Robinhood Command Center and engineering teams across the organization to align on dependency mapping, incident response workflows, and observability standards.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of owning and delivering large-scale observability or infrastructure platform initiatives.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes and public cloud environments (AWS preferred), with the ability to architect and operate distributed systems at scale regardless of specific vendor tooling.
• Strong coding proficiency in one or more languages (Go, Python, or similar) with experience integrating observability agents, libraries, and instrumentation directly into production codebases.
• Demonstrated experience owning an observability control plane or telemetry pipeline — including ingestion cost management, cardinality control, and signal routing — in a high-traffic production environment.
• Experience with the Vector data pipeline (or equivalent high-throughput log/metrics routing tools) and familiarity with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, Humio, or Sentry is a plus.

Qualifications

Robinhood is an equal opportunity employer. We offer reasonable accommodations upon request, and comply with applicable equal employment and privacy laws. Inclusion is built into how we hire and work—welcoming different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences so everyone can do their best.