Staff Engineer (Observability)

• As a Staff Engineer in the Observability domain, you will act as the technical North Star driving the long-term evolution of our global telemetry and monitoring ecosystem
• Our platform is at a pivotal turning point: we are transitioning from a traditional observability platform toward an intelligent, proactive companion that leverages automation to drastically reduce cognitive load and incident resolution times
• In this role, you will bridge the gap between our high-scale telemetry infrastructure (managing thousands of hybrid bare-metal and Kubernetes environments),our developer-facing software pipelines (processing billions of daily events), and observability experience in alerting and visualization
• You will play a defining role in shaping and executing our strategic roadmap focused on Intelligent Observability, Unified Data Foundation, and Zero-Friction Configuration
• Drive Strategic Architecture: Architect and execute the technical strategy for our unified, global observability platform, aligning long-term product vision with resilient, highly scalable engineering designs
• Scale the Data Foundation: Lead the architectural revamp of our petabyte-scale search, logging, and metrics systems. You will guide the transition from legacy, over-extended datastores to highly optimized, regionalized, and multi-tenant telemetry pipelines
• Enable Intelligent Observability: Architect the APIs, secure interfaces, and integration protocols that connect our unified data foundation to autonomous AI agents, enabling real-time diagnostics and conversational query tools
• Establish Resilient Topologies: Deconstruct monolithic monitoring setups into isolated, high-availability regional architectures to minimize blast radiuses and ensure global operational stability
• Simplify Developer Experience: Collaborate with product and engineering teams to design self-service developer tooling, leveraging GitOps-driven configuration models, automated schema enforcement, and intuitive quota and retention management
• Technical Leadership & Guidance: Provide high-level technical direction across the observability domain, fostering engineering excellence, championing robust design reviews, and guiding engineers through complex distributed systems challenges
• Advocate Company-Wide: Act as a technical advocate for the domain, partnering with engineering groups across Adyen to align telemetry capabilities with broader organizational needs, build and drive the adoption of developer-facing tools, and promote modern observability standards

Benefits

• Global exchange program
• Weekly happy hour
• Delicious healthy lunches
• Phantom share package
• Yearly trip to Amsterdam
• Paid holidays
• Work from home opportunities- Studies show that women and members of underrepresented communities apply for jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. Does this sound like you? If so, Adyen encourages you to reconsider and apply. We look forward to your application!
• AI-Ready Telemetry Design: Practical understanding of how to structure, schema-enforce, and clean high-volume telemetry streams to make them highly optimized for consumption by LLMs, semantic search engines, and RAG pipelines
• 10+ years of experience in software, systems, or platform engineering, including 3+ years in a similar technical leadership role within the observability or large-scale distributed data systems domain
• Kubernetes & Infrastructure Fluency: Extensive experience operating and troubleshooting high-throughput workloads on production Kubernetes (both on-prem and cloud) alongside a solid understanding of system-level performance tuning (networking, storage, and operating system limits)
• Distributed Systems & Storage Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience designing, scaling, and operating core telemetry data engines (such as distributed search databases, time-series metrics systems, high-performance logging architectures) at a multi-petabyte scale
• Influence and Collaboration: Exceptional communication and system-design skills, with a proven ability to translate complex technical trade-offs for diverse stakeholders, align multiple engineering teams around a unified technical vision, and mentor and upskill engineers to elevate domain-wide technical execution
• Software Engineering Mindset: Strong proficiency in software development (ideally in Go, Java, or Python) with a history of building production-grade, automated tooling and robust real-time data ingestion pipelines
• Telemetry Standardization: Experience adopting industry-standard telemetry collection frameworks (such as OpenTelemetry) and implementing SLO-driven alert governance
• Agentic & LLM Integration: Experience building or utilizing open standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) to safely expose platform data (metrics, logs, traces) to external AI agents and SRE assistants
• Intelligent Diagnostics: Experience designing or integrating automated anomaly detection, conversational AI querying interfaces (e.g., LLM co-pilots), or continuous profiling platforms
• Governance at Scale: Familiarity with implementing automated multi-tenant isolation, capacity management, and cost-attribution frameworks for large-scale enterprise developer platforms- Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days
• Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role