Staff Software Engineer

About the role

We are seeking a to take ownership of multiple pieces of critical architecture within our observability platform, driving technical decisions that define our product direction for the next five years. You will operate at the intersection of deep individual contribution and technical leadership, designing systems that handle trillions of data points daily with reliability and simplicity. This role requires you to deliver industry-leading solutions in areas such as data visualization, virtual runtime profiling, and planet scale streaming while ensuring designs align with company-wide engineering standards. You will be responsible for architecting, delivering, and maintaining systems that span the entire stack from edge to data layer. As a key member of the staff engineering community, you will mentor engineers, influence best practices, and help elevate the technical bar across the organization. You will also validate and refine AI-generated code to ensure correctness, performance, and maintainability in production environments. Some examples of projects you may own include rebuilding critical services to handle increased scale or leading the design of new profiling capabilities.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead the design and implementation of critical platform components that serve as the foundation for observability at global scale.

Own the full lifecycle of complex features from initial discovery through design, implementation, testing, and on-call responsibilities.

Dive deep into system performance and invent novel approaches to efficiency, reliability, and scalability across distributed systems.

Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and cross-functional teams to translate ambiguous problems into robust technical solutions.

Drive architectural decisions that balance tradeoffs between simplicity, performance, maintainability, and time-to-market.

Act as a subject matter expert for your area and provide technical guidance to multiple engineering teams.

Implement observability into your own work by defining and tracking metrics that reflect the health and adoption of your systems.

Champion engineering best practices including testing, code review, documentation, and production readiness.

Participate in on-call rotations to ensure system reliability and to respond to critical incidents as they arise.

Contribute to the broader industry conversation by sharing insights, patterns, and lessons learned both internally and externally.

Evaluate emerging technologies and tools, determining their applicability and value to our product and platform roadmap.

Mentor engineers at various levels by providing feedback, coaching, and hands-on collaboration on technical challenges.

Partner with security and compliance teams to ensure that designs meet organizational and regulatory requirements.

Continuously refactor and improve existing systems to reduce technical debt and increase developer productivity.

Requirements

You hold a BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or possess equivalent real-world experience that demonstrates similar depth.

You bring 10+ years of relevant engineering experience with a strong track record of delivering complex systems.

You have 4+ years of technical leadership experience, either through management or hands-on technical influence.

You have successfully led the design and delivery of industry-leading systems, demonstrating depth of expertise and broad organizational impact.

You are proficient in using AI coding tools in your daily workflow and can validate, critique, and refine their output effectively.

You communicate clearly and persuasively, able to translate technical concepts to diverse audiences.

You thrive in a fast-paced environment and are comfortable making decisions with incomplete information.

You have a strong bias for action and follow through on commitments even in the face of ambiguity.

You care deeply about building reliable, scalable, and maintainable software that serves both internal and external users.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to open source projects relevant to observability, monitoring, or data infrastructure.

Background in high-scale distributed systems, streaming platforms, or performance optimization.

Familiarity with AI-assisted development workflows and prompt engineering for software engineering tasks.

Practical notes

This role requires availability during standard business hours for collaboration with global teams.

Travel may be required occasionally for team meetings, customer visits, or industry events.

Employment eligibility to work in the United States is required for this position.

Candidates must comply with all company policies and security practices.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the role is filled.