Staff Software Engineer, Observability Platform

Role Description

The Observability Platform team exists to make production legible to every engineer and AI agent at Wealthsimple, on their first day and every day after. We treat the platform as a product, with our internal engineering teams as our customers.

Our mission is to provide the best, most consistent logging, metrics, and tracing experience. We do this by:

• Broking tools and patterns into golden paths that accelerate best practices.
• Connecting teams to business impact through SLOs, user flows, and customer experience signals.
• Instrumenting on open standards to minimize switching costs.
• Optimizing for unanticipated questions rather than pre-built dashboards.
• Designing for both humans and AI agents to investigate production through fast, high-cardinality data.

As the Staff Software Engineer on this team, you are the deepest technical builder and the person who sets the technical bar. You design the foundations, write the code that matters most, and raise the engineering quality of everyone around you.

In this role you'll have the opportunity to:

• Design and build the events-first foundation, owning the architecture of the wide-event data model and the high-throughput ingest, storage, and query pipelines.
• Build the SDKs and golden paths, designing and shipping instrumentation libraries and shared SDKs.
• Set the technical standards, defining instrumentation conventions and codifying them.
• Make production legible to AI agents by building fast query foundations and access patterns.
• Move fast with AI tooling, using AI coding tools to prototype and build large systems.
• Work confidently in ambiguity, making significant changes in unfamiliar codebases.
• Prove value through experiments, piloting new approaches with teams and measuring results.
• Raise the bar for others by mentoring senior engineers and leading cross-team technical initiatives.

Qualifications

• Significant software engineering experience, typically 8+ years, with a software development background.
• A hands-on, current coder in more than one language such as Kotlin and Ruby.
• Direct experience building an observability or telemetry platform and its SDKs.
• Depth in event-based and high-cardinality systems.
• Fluency with open standards and instrumentation.
• Comfort making significant changes in ambiguous codebases.
• Proficiency with AI coding tools and LLMs.
• Strong communication and influence skills.

Requirements

• Experience in a regulated or fintech environment.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and progressive delivery such as Argo Rollouts.
• Experience with columnar stores such as ClickHouse.
• Experience building observability for LLM and agent-based workloads.

Benefits

• Top-tier health benefits and life insurance.
• Long-term group savings with employer match, through Wealthsimple for Business.
• 20 vacation days, 4 wellness days, and unlimited sick and mental health days per year.
• 90 days away: work outside Canada for up to 90 days per year.
• Employee resource groups, including Rainbow (2SLGBTQ), Women of WS, and Black at WS.
• Hybrid team with over 1,500 employees across North America.