Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Observability roles sit at the center of modern SaaS operations because they convert complex, distributed product behavior into signals engineers can act on. This position is notable for its platform-wide scope: the tooling influences how many teams measure performance, investigate incidents, and maintain reliability across a widely used SaaS product. The inclusion of LLM observability also reflects an emerging SaaS need—treating AI features as production systems with measurable quality, cost, and safety characteristics.
For a long-term SaaS career, the work maps directly to the problems that appear as products scale: high-volume telemetry pipelines, service-level objectives, and cross-team instrumentation standards. Experience with OpenTelemetry-style ecosystems, storage and query trade-offs, and cost-aware monitoring is highly portable across B2B SaaS companies, especially those running microservices and Kubernetes. The AI instrumentation component adds a newer competency: building feedback loops from model behavior to product reliability.
This role fits an engineer who prefers enabling other builders rather than owning a single end-user feature area. It will suit someone comfortable making architectural decisions, setting operational guardrails, and collaborating broadly with infrastructure, product, and AI teams while maintaining hands-on ownership through production.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
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.
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.
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.
What You’ll Do:
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
Who You Are:
- 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.
Why Join Us?
- High Impact
Lead the modernization of Airtable’s observability stack, influencing how every engineer monitors and debugs mission-critical systems.
- Room to Innovate
Define and execute on a multi-year roadmap, introducing advanced logging, tracing, and metrics solutions that shape the entire developer experience.
- Career Growth
As a Sr Software engineer, you’ll drive major projects across engineering organization to build platform and services for solving observability problems
- Collaborative Culture
Work alongside talented platform engineers, product teams, and leadership to make data-driven decisions and ensure platform reliability.
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 EEO rights as an applicant.
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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 Accommodations Request Formand let us know how we may assist you. Airtable is committed to participating in the interactive process and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants.
