Staff Engineer - Observability

AdyenAmsterdamOn-siteFull-time9 Sept 2026

Adyen is seeking a Staff Engineer - Observability to act as the technical North Star for its global telemetry and monitoring ecosystem in Amsterdam. The role involves architecting a unified observability platform, scaling petabyte-scale data systems, and enabling intelligent observability with AI agents. Requires 10+ years of software/systems/platform engineering experience, including 3+ years in technical leadership within observability or large-scale distributed data systems.

What you'll do

Drive Strategic Architecture - Architect and execute the technical strategy for our unified, global observability platform, aligning long-term product vision with resilient, highly scalable engineering designs.
Scale the Data Foundation - Lead the architectural revamp of our petabyte-scale search, logging, and metrics systems. You will guide the transition from legacy, over-extended datastores to highly optimized, regionalized, and multi-tenant telemetry pipelines.
Enable Intelligent Observability - Architect the APIs, secure interfaces, and integration protocols that connect our unified data foundation to autonomous AI agents, enabling real-time diagnostics and conversational query tools.
Establish Resilient Topologies - Deconstruct monolithic monitoring setups into isolated, high-availability regional architectures to minimize blast radiuses and ensure global operational stability.
Simplify Developer Experience - Collaborate with product and engineering teams to design self-service developer tooling, leveraging GitOps-driven configuration models, automated schema enforcement, and intuitive quota and retention management.
Technical Leadership & Guidance - Provide high-level technical direction across the observability domain, fostering engineering excellence, championing robust design reviews, and guiding engineers through complex distributed systems challenges.
Advocate Company-Wide - Act as a technical advocate for the domain, partnering with engineering groups across Adyen to align telemetry capabilities with broader organizational needs, build and drive the adoption of developer-facing tools, and promote modern observability standards.

What you need

Must-have

Distributed SystemsStorageTelemetry Data EnginesDistributed Search DatabasesTime-Series Metrics SystemsHigh-Performance Logging ArchitecturesAI-Ready Telemetry DesignLLMs

Nice-to-have

Model Context Protocol (MCP)Agentic & LLM IntegrationAutomated Anomaly DetectionConversational AI Querying InterfacesContinuous Profiling PlatformsMulti-Tenant IsolationCapacity ManagementCost-Attribution Frameworks

Soft skills

CommunicationSystem-DesignInfluenceCollaborationMentoringTechnical LeadershipEngineering ExcellenceDesign Reviews

Staff EngineerObservabilityFinancial ServicesEngineeringInformation TechnologyFull-timeOn-siteAmsterdamDistributed SystemsKubernetes

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Must-have

Nice-to-have

Soft skills

What you'll do

What you need