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Senior Software Engineer I - Core Services

Remote - United States
What We’re Building
Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! 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, 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! 
 
If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these blog posts and Honeycomb.io press releases. 
 
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 Work
We 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

A Bit More About the Core Services Team

The Core Services team is the engine room of Honeycomb’s platform. We own the backend systems that make the product hum—streaming millions of events per second, querying data at scale, and ensuring observability is fast, reliable, and always available for our customers.

We're part of the growing Platform Engineering organization, focused on building resilient, scalable systems and shared infrastructure that power every part of the product. Whether it's optimizing Kafka pipelines, ensuring the resilience of high-throughput ingest services, or improving MySQL database query performance, our team is deeply collaborative and places an emphasis on performance, reliability, and simplicity.

Our work spans the stack and touches nearly every other team, so we often jump in to partner on projects, lend our expertise, and make sure new features can scale with our customers’ needs. If you love solving hard problems, enjoy working across systems, and thrive in environments where curiosity and impact go hand-in-hand—this is the place for you.

What You’ll Do

As a Core Services Engineer, you’ll:

  • Design, build, and maintain distributed systems that power the Honeycomb platform.
  • Develop and optimize backend systems in Golang—performance tuning, production-level instrumentation, testing, and debugging.
  • Move millions of high-throughput, low-latency events per second while ensuring system resilience and scalability.
  • Build internal services and shared components that support engineering teams across the org.
  • Join forces with other teams during feature development to ensure reliability at scale.
  • Help evolve our usage of AWS cloud services and Infrastructure as Code to scale intelligently and sustainably.
  • Participate in an on-call rotation, owning and resolving production incidents while driving reliability improvements.
  • Contribute to design conversations that balance technical tradeoffs, long-term maintainability, and business impact.
  • Champion documentation, share knowledge, and continuously improve how we work.
  • Experiment, iterate, and bring new ideas to life in a culture that encourages curiosity.

About You

You're a curious and collaborative engineer who thrives in complex systems and enjoys balancing sharp technical instincts with practical decision-making.

We’re looking for someone who is:

  • Experienced and Versatile – You have a strong background in distributed systems, backend development (especially in Go), and production-grade infrastructure. You're comfortable working across systems—from data storage to cloud configuration—and know your way around database queries, schema design, and debugging tools.
  • Fluent in Cloud & Scale – You have experience with AWS and understand what it takes to scale services gracefully. Bonus points for experience with Kafka, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, or Infrastructure as Code.
  • Collaborative and Kind – You’re a team player who communicates early and often, gives thoughtful feedback, and values clear written and verbal communication.
  • Quality-Minded – You believe in building robust systems with a strong emphasis on testing, code review, and clear processes that support fast-paced development without compromising stability.
  • Adaptable and Impact-Oriented – You’re comfortable jumping in where needed, working across boundaries, and choosing the right level of complexity for the task at hand.
  • Curious and Continuously Learning – You love to investigate, try new things, and learn alongside your teammates. You bring energy to solving tough problems and helping others grow.

Base pay (range) of USD $160,000-$180,000 based on level of experience

What you'll get when you join the Hive:

  • A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
  • It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
  • Time to recharge - Unlimited PTO and paid sabbatical
  • A remote-first mindset and culture (really!)
  • Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
  • 100% employee/75% for dependents coverage for all benefits 
  • Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
  • Annual development allowance 
  • And much more...
Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.
 
Diversity & Accommodations:
We're building a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other, and welcome nontraditional candidates, and people of all backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. Further, we (of course) follow federal and state disability laws and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations during the application phase, interview process, and employment. Please email talent@honeycomb.io to discuss accessible formats or accommodations. As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work; if we can do better - we want to know! 
 
Privacy Notice:
If you apply for a job at Honeycomb and your application is unsuccessful (or you withdraw from the process or decline our offer), Honeycomb will retain your information after your application for a period of time in accordance with local laws. We retain this information for various reasons, including in case we face a legal challenge in respect of a recruitment decision, to consider you for other current or future jobs at Honeycomb, and to help us better understand, analyze and improve our recruitment processes.
 
For more information regarding our privacy practices please see the Honeycomb Privacy Notice.
 
If you do not want us to retain your information for consideration for other roles, or want us to update it, please contact privacy@honeycomb.io. Please note, however, that we may retain some information if required by law or as necessary to protect ourselves from legal claims. 

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