Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, Logs

Responsibilities

• Lead the backend architecture and delivery of the Logs product area by owning the full lifecycle from API design through production reliability, with a strong sense of what makes a great end-user experience.
• Drive technical direction for log ingestion, storage, querying, and enrichment pipelines capable of handling hundreds of terabytes of telemetry daily.
• Build for both humans and AI agents — design APIs and workflows that work equally well for UI users and programmatic access by AI coding agents like Claude Code and Cursor.
• Partner deeply with PMs, Frontend, and Design to shape the product roadmap, translate user needs into sound technical designs, and identify backend capabilities that unlock high-value product experiences.
• Champion product thinking on the engineering team — bring clarity to trade-offs, flag gaps in requirements, and proactively surface opportunities to simplify or improve the product.
• Set the technical bar through code reviews, architecture reviews, and mentorship, establishing patterns that scale across the broader backend organization.
• Champion the use of AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor) to maintain high code quality and accelerate delivery.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience building and maintaining high-scale backend systems in production.
• Strong proficiency in Go, Java, or a comparable systems-oriented language; comfort working across the stack when needed.
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems — familiarity with streaming pipelines, columnar storage, or log/event processing is a strong plus.
• Demonstrated product acumen: you can read a PRD critically, push back on requirements that don't serve users, and propose simpler solutions without sacrificing outcomes.
• Track record of leading end-to-end feature delivery in close partnership with cross-functional teams (PM, Design, Frontend).
• Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain technical decisions to non-engineers and influence roadmap priorities with data and reasoning.

Bonus Points

• Experience building observability or log management systems (e.g., Splunk, Datadog, Elastic, Loki, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience operating data lakehouses under high performance and high scale.
• Experience with query DSLs, CEL, or similar expression evaluation frameworks.
• Prior experience in a tech lead or staff engineer capacity on a product-focused team.