Senior Software Engineer - APM & AI Observability
200k – 288kMenlo Park, CAOnsite5+ YOE
Summary
Builds and owns backend services, APIs, and streaming data pipelines for APM and AI observability products at scale. Requires 5+ years backend experience, strong distributed systems knowledge, and product mindset for cross-functional collaboration.
About the role
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end product scopes across APM and AI observability product lines — from backend behavior and API design to data pipeline architecture and client-side SDK work
- Build and optimize streaming data pipelines that tackle graph traversal challenges at scale and LLM-as-judge online evaluation pipelines for real-time agentic telemetry
- Design and implement backend services and APIs that power microservice topology views, service error detection, latency analysis, and agentic workflow monitoring
- Collaborate cross-functionally with frontend, design, product, and support teams to deliver products that are intuitive for both human users and AI-native workflows
- Drive architecture and delivery for medium-to-large projects end-to-end, from technical design through production launch
- Champion product thinking on the engineering team — deeply understand customer use cases in both microservice and agentic application contexts before diving into technical solutions
- Mentor junior engineers and lead technical design decisions that raise the quality bar across the team
Requirements
- BS in Computer Science or equivalent and solid computer science fundamentals (algorithms, systems, distributed computing)
- 5+ years of backend development experience with strong programming and debugging skills
- Experience working with complex data pipelines and/or data warehouses at production scale
- Demonstrated product mindset — seek to understand user motivation and use cases before diving into implementation
- Experience owning and driving medium-sized projects successfully, including architecture and cross-team delivery
- Strong communication and collaboration skills
- Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading technical design discussions
Nice-to-haves
- Experience building or working on APM or AI observability products (OpenTelemetry experience a strong plus)
- Hands-on experience building or operating agentic applications in production
- Exposure to customer-facing product development with strong product intuition
- Experience with streaming systems, distributed tracing, or graph-based data pipelines
- Prior experience in high-growth startups or fast-paced product environments
Skills
JavaPythonGodistributed systemsdata pipelinesstreaming systemsApache IcebergOpenTelemetrydistributed tracinggraph traversalmicroservicesAPIsLLMKubernetes
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