Staff Engineer – Observability Platform

Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Observability team. This role is ideal for a highly technical engineer who thrives on uncovering the truth behind complex system behaviors, diagnosing difficult production challenges, and driving platform-wide improvements. As a Staff Engineer, you will operate as a force multiplier across engineering teams, helping Postman build world-class observability capabilities while improving reliability, performance, and developer productivity. You will partner closely with Infrastructure, Platform, Product, Security, and Data teams to identify systemic issues, establish operational excellence, and ensure engineering teams have the visibility they need to operate at scale. What You'll Do • Drive the technical vision and architecture for Postman's observability platform. • Design and build scalable solutions for metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and operational analytics. • Investigate complex production issues, identify root causes, and drive long-term corrective actions. • Partner with engineering teams to improve service reliability, availability, performance, and operational maturity. • Establish observability standards, best practices, and instrumentation frameworks across the company. • Build tooling and automation that enable faster incident detection, diagnosis, and resolution. • Leverage telemetry data to uncover performance bottlenecks, capacity risks, and reliability gaps. • Drive cross-functional initiatives focused on platform health, operational excellence, and engineering productivity. • Mentor senior engineers and help raise the technical bar across the organization. What We're Looking For • 10+ years of software engineering experience with significant exposure to distributed systems and cloud-native architectures. • Strong expertise in observability domains including monitoring, logging, distributed tracing, telemetry pipelines, and incident management. • Experience operating large-scale production systems with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, and performance. • Deep understanding of system debugging, root-cause analysis, performance optimization, and production operations. • Strong programming experience in one or more languages such as Go, Java, Python, Node.js, or similar. • Experience with observability technologies such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Honeycomb, or equivalent platforms. • Ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority. • Strong communication skills and a data-driven approach to problem-solving. Preferred Qualifications • Experience building internal developer platforms or observability platforms at scale. • Exposure to AIOps, intelligent alerting, anomaly detection, or AI-powered operational tooling. • Experience driving reliability initiatives across multiple engineering organizations. • Background in SRE, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Developer Productivity. Why This Role Matters The Observability team sits at the center of Postman's engineering ecosystem. Success in this role means creating the visibility, insights, and operational intelligence that enable every engineering team at Postman to build and operate reliable products with confidence. This is a high-impact Staff Engineer position for someone who enjoys solving complex distributed systems challenges, driving engineering excellence, and uncovering the signals that help teams make better decisions. What Else? In addition to Postman's pay-on-performance philosophy, and a flexible schedule working with a fun, collaborative team, Postman offers a comprehensive set of benefits, including full medical coverage, flexible PTO, wellness reimbursement, and a monthly lunch stipend. Along with that, our wellness programs will help you stay in the best of your physical and mental health. Our frequent and fascinating team-building events will keep you connected, while our donation-matching program can support the causes you care about. We’re building a long-term company with an inclusive culture where everyone can be the best version of themselves. At Postman we value in person collaboration. We are in office 5 days a week for all roles based out of our hubs in San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Austin, New York City, Tokyo and London. For roles based in Bangalore, employees currently work in the office three days a week and will transition to five days per week by the end of the year. We were thoughtful in our approach which is based on collaboration and grounded in feedback from our workforce, leadership team, and peers. The benefits of our in office model will be shared knowledge, brainstorming sessions, communication, and building trust in-person that cannot be replicated via zoom. Our Values At Postman, we create with the same curiosity that we see in our users. We value transparency and honest communication about not only successes, but also failures. In our work, we focus on specific goals that add up to a larger vision. Our inclusive work culture ensures that everyone is valued equally as important pieces of our final product. We are dedicated to delivering the best products we can. Equal opportunity Postman is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status. Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. Postman does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes. Postman will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Postman.