Senior Forward Deployed Engineer - Honeycomb

About Honeycomb

Honeycomb is defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do. We work with well-known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard across a range of industries. We are a fully distributed company with Series D funding, over 200 team members, and recognition on Forbes’ America’s Best Startups list.

About the Role

Honeycomb's Forward Deployed Engineers are senior technical field engineers who work with customers as both long-term strategic partners and embedded engineers. They own data strategy—including pipelines, sampling, instrumentation standards, and governance—while building real production outcomes like SLOs and boards on customer platforms.

What You'll Do

• Lead customers in the strategic application of Honeycomb and Observability practices to meet their technical and business goals.
• Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to articulate Honeycomb's value proposition and vision at executive and technical levels.
• Act as a trusted advisor on telemetry schema design, event structuring, and data modeling for long-term queryability.
• Become a subject-matter expert in sampling strategies and Refinery sampling operations to balance cost, fidelity, and operational insight.
• Work hands-on with engineering teams and leaders to teach, coach, and mentor on Observability, SRE concepts, and instrumentation best practices.
• Advise customers on telemetry ownership, internal documentation, naming conventions, and scaling attribution practices.
• Scope, build, and ship working instrumentation, SLOs, and boards running in production.
• Create high-quality reusable content including trainings, talks, blog posts, white papers, and reference architectures.
• Represent the voice of the customer in internal product and engineering discussions.

What You'll Bring

• Deep understanding of OpenTelemetry projects, components, SDKs, and ecosystems.
• Strong intuition for telemetry data modeling, event schema design, cardinality, and queryability.
• Ability to analyze application architecture and flow to instrument it effectively.
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm), and CI/CD tools (CircleCI, GitHub Actions).
• Background in Software Development or System Operations, ideally working with distributed systems at scale.
• Fluency in at least one language: Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, or .NET.
• Excellent written and verbal technical communication skills across engineering teams and executive leadership.

Bonus Points

• Previous experience in Customer Success, Technical Account Management, Sales Engineering, or Consulting.
• Deep understanding of Distributed Tracing concepts (Context Propagation, Sampling, Visualization).

Benefits & Perks

• Generous equity with employee-friendly stock program.
• Transparent, leveled compensation structure.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Home office, co-working, and internet stipends.
• Full benefits coverage for employees, plus additional dependent options.
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Annual professional development allowance.