Senior Software Engineer II - Storage

What We’re Building

Honeycomb is defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well-known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard across a range of industries. We’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!

How We Work

We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time, we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1.

About the Team

The Storage Team at Honeycomb is the backbone of our platform, responsible for the performance, reliability, and scalability of storing and querying billions of events. We design and own the architecture that powers correct and dependable query results — enabling every product experience from Metrics to Triggers and SLOs. As a senior engineer on Storage, you’ll work on high-impact systems where our customers may never see your code directly, but they’ll rely on it every time they use Honeycomb.

What you’ll do in the role:

• Build and deliver high-quality solutions. Design and implement solutions that power Honeycomb’s query and data storage infrastructure. Whether it’s improving query performance, evolving the Retriever service, or making our storage layer more reliable, you’re eager to jump in and add value.
• Scope and deliver projects independently. Break down complex storage and querying problems into achievable steps, surface trade-offs, and pull in teammates when needed. Take ownership end-to-end — from design to production support.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners. Work closely with Product Management and other engineering teams to connect technical solutions to product needs, from problem discovery through solution design and delivery.
• Support our services in production. Participate in on-call rotations, help define team KPIs and SLOs, and proactively reduce toil by addressing reliability challenges before they reach customers.
• Learn new ways to solve complex problems. Explore new technologies, data storage techniques, and query optimization strategies to keep performance and reliability strong at scale.
• Thrive on collaboration. Enjoy pairing, reviewing code, and offering constructive feedback. Model strong ownership and help your teammates grow.

What you’ll bring to the role:

• Technical leadership in storage and querying. Experience leading the design of patterns and guidelines that improve performance and reliability. Strong expertise in writing Go along with experience working on high-throughput or complex systems. Prior experience with database engineering is a plus, as is comfort with Kubernetes.
• Curiosity and experimentation. A drive to learn by digging in—individually, in pairs, or as a team. You ask questions to better understand complex systems, explore trade-offs, and believe in learning from incidents.
• Focus on business outcomes. Ability to tie technical decisions to customer and company impact, weighing whether work is necessary now or later.
• Strength in mentorship and teamwork. Experience guiding engineers through code reviews and helping spread knowledge across a team with diverse skillsets.
• Resilience in collaboration. Comfort working in a senior-heavy team, giving and receiving feedback with grace, and contributing to a culture where tough problems lead to better outcomes.
• Execution with impact. Ability to scope and deliver complex, multi-team projects while balancing production realities and proactively reducing toil.
• Deep debugging expertise. Trusted to diagnose and resolve the toughest production issues across the stack.
• Influence beyond your team. Ability to multiply impact by sharing knowledge, guiding adoption of new technologies, and driving foundational work.

What you'll get when you join the Hive:

• A stake in our success: Generous equity with an employee-friendly stock program.
• Transparent compensation: Pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience.
• Time to recharge: Unlimited PTO.
• Distributed-first culture: A remote-first mindset and culture.
• Stipends: Home office, co-working, and internet stipend.
• Full benefits coverage: Comprehensive health coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents.
• Parental leave: Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood.
• Professional development: Annual development allowance.

Please note: We cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time.