Software Engineer, Observability at Airtable

United States

$196k - $270k

<p>Airtable is the no-code app platform that empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes. More than 500,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100, rely on Airtable to transform how work gets done.</p><p>The Observability team at Airtable ensures that our engineers have the tools they need to measure performance, monitor reliability, and debug issues in real time. Our mission is to provide actionable insights into errors and crashes, fueling a better and more reliable experience for millions of users. We build logging, metrics, and tracing systems that are leveraged by nearly every engineering team at Airtable.</p> <p>We also work on LLM observability for AI-powered features. We provide visibility into prompts, model calls, and RAG components, with a focus on latency, reliability, cost, safety signals, and evaluation quality.</p> <p>If you’re excited about building resilient systems at scale, empowering engineers with best-in-class observability, and shaping the future of Airtable’s infrastructure, we’d love to hear from you.</p> <h1><strong>What You’ll Do:</strong></h1> <h2><strong>Architect and scale core observability</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Lead the design and evolution of logging, metrics, and tracing pipelines to handle massive data volumes</li> <li>Evaluate and integrate new technologies (e.g., OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, ELK stack) that enhance Airtable’s observability posture</li> <li>Guide and mentor a growing team of infrastructure engineers; share best practices in distributed tracing, monitoring, and logging</li> <li>Define and uphold coding standards and operational excellence across the org</li> <li>Partner with Deploy Infrastructure, Service Orchestration, and Product teams to embed observability throughout the development lifecycle</li> <li>Align infrastructure decisions with business goals to detect issues before they impact customers</li> <li>Own end-to-end reliability for observability tools and establish SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets</li> <li>Optimize performance and cost of large-scale data pipelines and storage</li> <li>Shape the observability roadmap, prioritizing initiatives like improved tracing coverage, advanced monitoring dashboards, and next-gen logging pipelines</li> <li>Continuously explore emerging trends to keep Airtable’s monitoring capabilities at the cutting edge</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Extend observability to LLM and AI features</strong></h2> <ul> <li>Instrument prompts, model calls, and RAG pipelines to capture latency, reliability, cost, and safety signals</li> <li>Design online and offline evaluation loops for LLM quality, including canary analysis and drift detection</li> <li>Build dashboards and alerts for token usage, error rates, guardrail triggers, and model performance; connect these signals to tracing for prompt lineage</li> <li>Partner with AI and Product teams to define SLOs for AI features and close the feedback loop from incidents to model and prompt improvements</li> </ul> <h1><strong>Who You Are:</strong></h1> <ul> <li>6+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on observability, or infrastructure at scale.</li> <li>Demonstrated success implementing and running production-grade logging, metrics, or tracing systems.</li> <li>Proficiency in distributed systems concepts, data streaming pipelines, and container orchestration (Kubernetes).</li> <li>Deep hands-on knowledge of tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK Stack, Loki, or ClickHouse.</li> <li>Comfort with at least one programming language (e.g., Go, Python, Java) to build and maintain observability tooling.</li> <li>Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating across multiple teams.</li> <li>Strong communication skills to effectively present technical trade-offs and architectural plans.</li> <li>Eagerness to own high-impact initiatives from design through production and maintenance.</li> <li>Proven ability to balance short-term fixes with long-term strategic vision.</li> <li>A passion for enabling all of Airtable’s engineering organization through reliable, intuitive observability tools.</li> <li>Commitment to measuring success by the velocity and confidence with which product teams can ship.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>Why Join Us?</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>High Impact</strong><strong><br/></strong>Lead the modernization of Airtable’s observability stack, influencing how every engineer monitors and debugs mission-critical systems.</li> <li><strong>Room to Innovate</strong><strong><br/></strong>Define and execute on a multi-year roadmap, introducing advanced logging, tracing, and metrics solutions that shape the entire developer experience.</li> <li><strong>Career Growth</strong><strong><br/></strong>As a Sr Software engineer, you’ll drive major projects across engineering organization to build platform and services for solving observability problems</li> <li><strong>Collaborative Culture</strong><strong><br/></strong>Work alongside talented platform engineers, product teams, and leadership to make data-driven decisions and ensure platform reliability.</li> </ul> <p><span>Airtable is an equal opportunity employer. We embrace diversity and strive to create a workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. We welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or any characteristic protected by applicable federal and state laws, regulations and ordinances. Learn more about your </span><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jAj2by1bto5g8Xqn9hWNAwPOMGNd_fM6/view?usp=sharing"><span>EEO rights as an applicant</span></a><strong>. </strong></p> <p><span>VEVRAA-Federal Contractor</span></p> <p><span>If you have a medical condition, disability, or religious belief/practice which inhibits your ability to participate in any part of the application or interview process, please complete our </span><a href="https://airtable.com/shrq13fCV8h1sx2t8"><span>Accommodations Request Form</span></a><span> </span><span>and let us know how we may assist you. Airtable is committed to participating in the interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants.</span></p> <p>Compensation awarded to successful candidates will vary based on their work location, relevant skills, and experience.</p> <p><span>Our total compensation package also includes the opportunity to receive benefits, restricted stock units, and may include incentive compensation.<span> </span></span><span>To learn more about our comprehensive benefit offerings, please check out<span> </span></span><a href="https://airtable.com/careers/life-at-airtable"><span>Life at Airtable</span></a><span>.</span></p>For work locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, New York City, and Los Angeles, the base salary range for this role is:<span>$196,000</span><span>—</span><span>$270,000 USD</span><p>Please see our Privacy Notice for details regarding Airtable’s collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking <a href="https://www.airtable.com/company/personnel-privacy-notice" target="_blank">here</a>.</p> <p>🔒 <strong>Stay Safe from Job Scams</strong><br/>All official Airtable communication will come from an <strong>@airtable.com</strong> email address. We will never ask you to share sensitive information or purchase equipment during the hiring process. If in doubt, contact us at <a href="mailto:hr@airtable.com">hr@airtable.com</a>. Learn more about avoiding job scams <a href="https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2022/05/want-work-home-spot-scams-first">here</a>.</p>