Software Engineer, Observability

Airtable is the no-code app platform that empowers people closest to the work to accelerate their most critical business processes. The Observability team at Airtable ensures that engineers have the tools needed to measure performance, monitor reliability, and debug issues in real time, while also working on LLM observability for AI-powered features.

Responsibilities:

• Architect and scale core observability
• Lead the design and evolution of logging, metrics, and tracing pipelines to handle massive data volumes
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies (e.g., OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, ELK stack) that enhance Airtable’s observability posture
• Guide and mentor a growing team of infrastructure engineers; share best practices in distributed tracing, monitoring, and logging
• Define and uphold coding standards and operational excellence across the org
• Partner with Deploy Infrastructure, Service Orchestration, and Product teams to embed observability throughout the development lifecycle
• Align infrastructure decisions with business goals to detect issues before they impact customers
• Own end-to-end reliability for observability tools and establish SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets
• Optimize performance and cost of large-scale data pipelines and storage
• Shape the observability roadmap, prioritizing initiatives like improved tracing coverage, advanced monitoring dashboards, and next-gen logging pipelines
• Continuously explore emerging trends to keep Airtable’s monitoring capabilities at the cutting edge
• Extend observability to LLM and AI features
• Instrument prompts, model calls, and RAG pipelines to capture latency, reliability, cost, and safety signals
• Design online and offline evaluation loops for LLM quality, including canary analysis and drift detection
• Build dashboards and alerts for token usage, error rates, guardrail triggers, and model performance; connect these signals to tracing for prompt lineage
• Partner with AI and Product teams to define SLOs for AI features and close the feedback loop from incidents to model and prompt improvements

Requirements:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with 3+ years focused on observability, or infrastructure at scale
• Demonstrated success implementing and running production-grade logging, metrics, or tracing systems
• Proficiency in distributed systems concepts, data streaming pipelines, and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Deep hands-on knowledge of tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK Stack, Loki, or ClickHouse
• Comfort with at least one programming language (e.g., Go, Python, Java) to build and maintain observability tooling
• Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating across multiple teams
• Strong communication skills to effectively present technical trade-offs and architectural plans
• Eagerness to own high-impact initiatives from design through production and maintenance
• Proven ability to balance short-term fixes with long-term strategic vision
• A passion for enabling all of Airtable's engineering organization through reliable, intuitive observability tools
• Commitment to measuring success by the velocity and confidence with which product teams can ship