Midlevel Software Engineer - Core Services

What We’re BuildingHoneycomb is the observability platform to help find and solve problems you couldn’t before. It’s a service for the near and present future, where distributed systems are the new default, every service is a platform, and empowered generalist software engineers are the new ops. We are passionate about consumer-quality developer tools and excited to build technology that raises our industry’s expectations of what our tools can do for us. We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, as we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 150-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022!
The Honeycomb product handles enormous amounts of data, and the Core Services team builds and manages all the internals that make the product work. As a Core Services Engineer, you’ll be joining a growing Platform Engineering org, helping us scale and build resilient systems, shared components used by the rest of engineering, and the services that bring everything else together. You’ll shepherd millions of messages per second through our Kafka cluster, manage thousands of scheduled queries across our storage engine, and present the right abstractions around data storage to our application code.
Check out this recent blog post about How We Leveraged the Honeycomb Network Agent for Kubernetes to Remediate Our IMDS Security Finding to see more about what our teams have been up to!
Who We Are We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.
How We WorkWe are a remote-first 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. #LI-Remote
We can hire for this role in the United States and Canada.

What You'll Do:

• Be a generalist. This team’s work will naturally touch multiple areas of the product to ensure it scales in its entirety. This includes providing common abstractions and tools for the rest of the engineering team, building new services, and maintaining existing work.
• Scale high-throughput services. We are moving millions of events per second with low latency and growing. This role will let you explore what happens when straightforward individual tasks are suddenly running in between, on top of, and all around each other in interesting and complicated ways. You’ll help us ensure that the product flows smoothly even as it increases in volume and complexity.
• Work well with other teams. As other engineering teams are building new features, we will often join their team for a while to help ensure it will scale well with the expected load.
• Care deeply about software quality and testing. A strong candidate for this role would be interested in testing and have experience finding the best ways to keep a high level of quality without spending an ever-growing amount of time on maintaining tests. They would also be a practiced code reviewer, able to give kind, thoughtful feedback to other engineers on Pull Requests to the product codebase.
• Value clear, open communication. We see clear, thoughtful, and regular written & face-to-face communication (including a willingness to give & receive feedback) as a fundamental engineering skill and one of the strongest predictors of future engineering impact, not just a nice to have, and we hope you do too.

About You:

• You can debug both automated and human processes. The systems that let our service run are both technical and social. Building processes to facilitate effective responses to service failures from the engineers running these services gives us room to automate responses.
• You can work in both software engineering and operations. Deeply understanding how internet services run and scale is critical to ensuring their reliability. Building systems to help them scale is critical to helping the team move quickly. A Core Services Engineering must live in harmony with both worlds to succeed, pinch hitting across our stack from the storage engine itself, our automation around it, and the configuration of our infrastructure. The id