Staff Software Engineer, Robinhood
Observability
+ Bonus + Equity
3+ days a week in office (Menlo Park, CA)
Commission-free stock trading & investing app
Be an early applicant
Commission-free stock trading & investing app
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
+ Bonus + Equity
3+ days a week in office (Menlo Park, CA)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To democratize finance for all.
Role
Who you are
- We are building an elite team, applying frontier technologies to the world's biggest financial problems. We're looking for bold thinkers. Sharp problem-solvers. Builders who are wired to make an impact
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of owning and delivering large-scale observability or infrastructure platform initiatives
- Deep expertise in Kubernetes and public cloud environments (AWS preferred), with the ability to architect and operate distributed systems at scale regardless of specific vendor tooling
- Strong coding proficiency in one or more languages (Go, Python, or similar) with experience integrating observability agents, libraries, and instrumentation directly into production codebases
- Demonstrated experience owning an observability control plane or telemetry pipeline — including ingestion cost management, cardinality control, and signal routing — in a high-traffic production environment
- Experience with the Vector data pipeline (or equivalent high-throughput log/metrics routing tools) and familiarity with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Honeycomb, Humio, or Sentry is a plus
What the job involves
- The Observability team's mission is to build and own Robinhood's full-stack observability platform — the foundation that keeps every product, service, and customer experience running reliably at scale. We design and operate the systems that give engineers deep visibility into how Robinhood's infrastructure behaves, ensuring that when something goes wrong, the right people know immediately and can act fast
- Our work spans metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and alerting pipelines, and we partner closely with the Robinhood Command Center to ensure our observability systems meet or exceed 99.9% uptime. We believe in monitoring our own monitors — the observability infrastructure is a product, not just a tool
- As a Staff Software Engineer on the Observability team, you will be the technical lead shaping the roadmap for how Robinhood observes itself at scale. You will own the observability control plane end-to-end, making architectural decisions that directly impact the reliability and operational health of Robinhood's entire product surface
- You'll lead a team of six engineers, drive the strategy for cost-efficient telemetry ingestion, build in-house solutions where off-the-shelf tooling falls short, and integrate AI-driven approaches to accelerate progress toward full-stack observability
- This is a high-ownership, high-visibility role where your technical decisions set the direction for the entire organization!
- Define and execute the full-stack observability roadmap, establishing a clear technical vision for metrics, logs, traces, and alerting infrastructure across Robinhood's engineering organization
- Own and evolve the observability control plane, including telemetry ingestion pipelines, cost management strategies, and the tooling that ensures observability components remain highly available
- Lead and collaborate with a team of six engineers to build scalable, self-service observability solutions that enable product and infrastructure teams to move faster with greater confidence
- Establish and maintain SLOs for observability systems that meet or exceed Robinhood's 99.9% uptime target, ensuring the observability platform is as reliable as the services it monitors
- Partner with the Robinhood Command Center and engineering teams across the organization to align on dependency mapping, incident response workflows, and observability standards
Our take
For years, traditional brokers ruled the share trading realm, charging hefty fees that locked out everyday investors. Robinhood emerged as a disruptor, offering commission-free trading and opening the door to a new generation. Since then, expectations have continued to evolve, with investors looking not just to lower costs, but for simpler tools, clearer information, and guidance that makes the market easier to understand.
Robinhood was built to meet those changing expectations, designed from the start as a mobile-first platform that makes investor more accessible and less intimidating for people at every stage of their financial journey. Through its app, users can trade stocks and other financial instruments while benefiting from a clean interface and built-in educational support, helping them move from curiosity to confidence without unnecessary complexity.
Recently, Robinhood has strenghtned its impact too, particularly in the UK. With the launch of AI-powered Digests within its Robinhood Cortex assistant that helps users understand what's driving stock movements in plain English, while upcoming options trading and expanded educational resources add flexibility and depth. Together, these steps position Robinhood as a platform evolving alongside its users, blending technology and education to stay ahead in an ever-changing investment landscape.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (last 2 of 13 rounds)
Feb 2021
$2.4bn
CONVERTIBLE
Jan 2021
$1bn
LATE VC
Total funding: $5.6bn
Company HQ
Downtown Menlo Park, Menlo Park, CA
Leadership
Vlad Tenev
(Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman)Studied Mathematics at Stanford University, where they met Baiju. Dropped out of a PhD to start Robinhood. Alongside Robinhood, Vlad is also the co-founder and Executive Chairman of Harmonic.
Baiju B.
(Co-Founder)Studied Mathematics and Physics at Stanford University, where they met their Vlad and co-founded Robinhood in 2012. Baiju is also the Founder and CEO of Aetherflux.
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