Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry
Develops OpenTelemetry Collector components, SDK libraries, and instrumentation for emerging domains like LLM/AI and Browser RUM. Collaborates with open-source community on contributions, RFCs, and standards while owning Observe Agent architecture. Requires 5+ years experience with strong Go skills and OTel ecosystem knowledge.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Pioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community, defining and building next-generation telemetry collection for emerging domains including LLM/AI inference, Browser RUM, and mobile.
- Design and implement OTel Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters) and SDK instrumentation libraries that strengthen Observe's position as a leading OTel destination.
- Collaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community by contributing code, participating in SIG discussions, authoring RFCs, and reviewing pull requests to ensure high-quality contributions.
- Architect and own the Observe Agent — our OTel Collector distribution — including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategy.
- Contribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping define standardized telemetry schemas for new and evolving technology domains.
- Work with product and field engineering teams to translate customer instrumentation challenges into upstream contributions and product features.
- Represent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community — present at conferences, build relationships with maintainers at other vendors, and drive consensus on specification decisions.
Requirements
- 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries).
- Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector) and familiarity with at least one SDK language (Java, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or .NET).
- Deep understanding of OTel's architecture: the Collector pipeline model, SDK internals, context propagation, and the semantic conventions specification process.
- Experience contributing to open-source projects with multi-vendor governance — consensus-building, RFC authorship, and cross-organizational collaboration.
- Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the observability and telemetry ecosystem.
- Strong opinions on instrumentation design: what makes telemetry useful vs. noisy, and how to balance coverage with performance overhead.
Nice-to-Haves
- Approver or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP).
- LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metrics.
- Browser RUM or front-end performance instrumentation.
- Designing and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operator.
Skills
OpenTelemetry, Go, Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, .Net, Otel Collector, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP
Similar jobs
Backend Engineering jobs
Machinify
United States
Senior backend engineer responsible for architecting and shipping scalable, reliable web applications and distributed systems for a healthcare audit product. The role requires 8+ years of backend experience, strong Java or Scala expertise, cloud-scale systems experience, and the ability to mentor engineers and adopt AI-assisted development practices.
Snowflake
Bellevue, WA
Design and build scalable systems that monitor, govern, and optimize cloud spending across Snowflake. The role requires 7+ years of production systems experience, strong programming and architectural skills, and expertise in cloud efficiency or observability.
Snowflake
Menlo Park, CA
Senior software engineer responsible for architecting and scaling Snowflake’s multi-cloud managed database infrastructure, including distributed systems, automation, reliability, and security. Requires 7+ years of backend systems experience and strong proficiency in cloud platforms and infrastructure automation.
Snowflake
Build and operate Snowflake’s multi-cloud capacity platform for CPU and GPU procurement, allocation, forecasting, and utilization. The role requires 7+ years of large-scale production systems experience, cloud fleet provisioning expertise, and strong programming and troubleshooting skills.
Snowflake
Menlo Park, CA
Build scalable backend systems and user-facing workflow features for Observe by Snowflake’s observability platform. The role requires senior-level software engineering experience, strong distributed-systems foundations, and proficiency in Go or another high-performance systems language.