Staff Software Engineer, Observability Platform

BUILD SOMETHING PEOPLE LOVE Wealthsimple is Canada’s leading financial innovator. The company offers a full suite of simple, sophisticated financial products across managed investing, do-it-yourself trading, cryptocurrency, tax filing, spending and saving. Wealthsimple currently serves more than 4 million Canadians and holds over $155 billion in assets under administration. The company was founded in 2014 by a team of financial experts and technology entrepreneurs, and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. We're proud of what we've built — and we're just getting started. Read our Culture Manual https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/culture and learn more about how we work https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/careers. ABOUT THE OBSERVABILITY PLATFORM TEAM 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 brokering tools and patterns into golden paths that accelerate best practices, and by connecting teams to business impact through SLOs, user flows, and customer experience signals. We instrument on open standards so that switching costs are a configuration change rather than a rewrite, we optimize for the questions engineers did not anticipate rather than for pre-built dashboards, and we design for a world where both humans and AI agents 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: - Build the Event Foundation: Own the architecture for wide-event data models, high-cardinality storage, and high-throughput ingestion and query pipelines (columnar/streaming). - Craft SDKs & Golden Paths: Design, ship, and drive adoption for telemetry libraries and SDKs that make rich instrumentation the path of least resistance. - Set Technical Standards: Define instrumentation conventions, naming, tagging, sampling, and OpenTelemetry standards so humans and machines speak one language. - Enable AI Agents in Production: Build fast query foundations and access patterns (e.g., Model Context Protocol / MCP) that allow AI agents to investigate incidents and verify changes alongside engineers. - Build Fast with AI: Leverage modern AI tools (like Claude Code) to prototype, navigate complex systems, and help elevate the team’s AI-assisted workflows. - Navigate Ambiguity: Dive into unfamiliar codebases to deliver significant, well-reasoned, high-impact changes safely. - Experiment & Scale: Pilot new approaches with select teams, measure impact, and scale what works before committing broadly. - Raise the Technical Bar: Mentor senior engineers, review complex architecture, and lead cross-team technical initiatives through influence. WHAT YOU'LL BRING: - 8+ Years in Software Engineering: Strong software background (building platforms as software) rather than pure Ops/SysAdmin. - Multi-Language Coder: Current, hands-on experience writing production code in multiple languages (e.g., Kotlin, Ruby). - Proven Telemetry Experience: Prior success building telemetry platforms, ingestion pipelines, and developer-facing SDKs. - Event & Scale Mastery: Deep understanding of wide structured events, streaming/columnar backends, cardinality, sampling, and context propagation. - Open Standards Expert: Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry (or equivalent) and designing SLIs/SLOs. - System Navigator: Ability to quickly map out, safely refactor, and impact complex, ambiguous codebases you didn't originally build. - AI-Fluent Developer: Daily proficiency with AI tools (like Claude Code)…