Senior Software Engineer, Observability

About the Team & Role

The Observability team's mission is to build and own Robinhood's full-stack observability platform — the foundation that keeps every product, service, and customer experience running reliably at scale. We design and operate the systems that give engineers deep visibility into how Robinhood's infrastructure behaves, ensuring that when something goes wrong, the right people know immediately and can act fast. Our work spans metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and alerting pipelines, partnering closely with the Robinhood Command Center to ensure our observability systems meet or exceed 99.9% uptime.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Observability team, you will be the technical lead shaping the roadmap for how Robinhood observes itself at scale. You will own the observability control plane end-to-end, making architectural decisions that directly impact the reliability and operational health of Robinhood's entire product surface. You'll lead a team of six engineers, drive the strategy for cost-efficient telemetry ingestion, build in-house solutions where off-the-shelf tooling falls short, and integrate AI-driven approaches to accelerate progress toward full-stack observability.

This role is based in our Menlo Park, CA office, with in-person attendance expected at least 3 days per week.

What You'll Do

• 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 tooling to ensure high availability.
• Lead and collaborate with a team of six engineers to build scalable, self-service observability solutions.
• Establish and maintain SLOs for observability systems that meet or exceed Robinhood's 99.9% uptime target.
• Partner with the Robinhood Command Center and engineering teams to align on dependency mapping, incident response workflows, and observability standards.

What You Bring

• 5+ 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.
• 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.