Software Engineer - Platform Observability and Intelligence

Software Engineer

We are looking for a full-stack software engineer to join Fastly’s Platform Observability and Intelligence (POI) team.

The POI team is responsible for:

• Fastly's internal observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, OpenTelemetry, and more), spanning cloud infrastructure and physical hardware.
• Fastly's internal developer portal, built on Backstage.
• An internal set of tools and data pipelines that synthesize network and financial data to provide insights into network costs, capacity planning, and related business concerns.

We are specifically looking for someone to contribute to the first two items on this list, though you will work across all of our software.

This is a generalist, mid-level position, ideal for someone with a few years of experience who is seeking to grow their career. We are looking for an engineer who is curious, proactive, and eager to grow into an impactful role. You will work broadly and deeply, contribute meaningfully to projects that affect how Fastly engineers understand and operate their services, and build toward owning larger pieces of work over time.

What You'll Do:

• Design, build and maintain software and platform capabilities that power Fastly’s internal observability function and developer experience
• Contribute to the development of our internal developer portal, helping engineering teams discover services, documentation, and operational tooling all in one place
• Work with your team to break down project requirements into concrete tasks, and take ownership of your assigned work through to completion
• Debug and resolve issues across the software stack, from datacenter hardware to the browser, often spanning multiple services and data sources
• Communicate clearly about the status of your work and any problems you encounter. Write useful updates, ask good questions, and raise issues early rather than at the deadline
• Collaborate with other engineers on the team. Provide thoughtful code review and share context and knowledge.
• Participate constructively in team planning and retrospectives
• Participate in on-call rotation as required, and respond to incidents within the team's SLA while on-call.

What We're Looking For:

Technical skills:

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated ability to deliver quality work on reasonably well-defined projects with limited oversight
• Experience in a statically typed, modern back-end language (Go, Java, Rust, etc.)
• Experience in modern front-end frameworks (React, etc.), or a willingness to dive in and become proficient
• Experience with SQL and database-driven applications
• Experience working with Linux systems and the shell
• Experience working with distributed systems or cloud-based services, and an interest in developing deeper expertise in operating and debugging them
• Comfort with large and unfamiliar codebases: jumping into a system you didn't build, figuring out the context, and contributing with confidence. Our stack is broad, and you will regularly work in code you haven't seen before, including code written at Fastly and open-source codebases.
• Strong debugging skills: forming hypotheses and narrowing down causes methodically. You’re willing to step outside your primary area of expertise to get to the bottom of something.

Ways of working:

• Clear, thoughtful writing and communication. You understand that a precise Slack message, a well-written pull request description, or a clear explanation to a teammate is just as important as the code itself.
• A service mindset. The people who use our tools depend on them to do their jobs. You care about their experience, you're approachable when they have questions, and you follow through and close the communication loop
• A proactive disposition. You take ownership of your responsibilities. When you finish a task, you look for the next useful thing. When you see something that could be better, you say so.
• Comfort working within lightweight agile processes. You participate constructively in planning and retrospectives, and you see team rituals as tools for coordination, productivity, and collaboration.
• A desire to grow in your skills, knowledge, and scope. Enthusiasm for learning new technologies.

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

• Backstage or other internal developer portal frameworks, open-source software in general
• Enterprise-scale observability systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Datadog, ELK, or similar
• Cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Chef)
• Data science and data engineering, capacity planning, cost modeling, or FinOps practices
• Network protocols and infrastructure, datacenter infrastructure, physical server administration
• Training, teaching, or developing documentation and educational materials for internal tools

Work Hours:

This position will require you to be available during core business hours. It may also require occasional nights and weekends as necessary to support any on-call coverage.

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements:

This position is open to Hybrid And Remote Work Locations.

The preferred locations for this position are:

• San Francisco, CA
• New York, NY

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home.

There is a strong preference for Hybrid near a local office. However, we may be willing to consider remote candidates within the US.

This position may require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager.