Lead Software Engineer

Your opportunity

If you are driven by innovation, passionate about technical excellence, and ready to lead a team of exceptional engineers, apply now for the position of Lead Software Engineer at New Relic. Let's embark on an exciting journey of innovation and technical advancements together!

At New Relic, we provide businesses with a state-of-the-art observability platform, leveraging advanced technologies to deliver real-time insights into the performance of software applications and infrastructure. As a company at the forefront of the industry, we enable organizations to monitor, analyze, and optimize their systems to achieve enhanced reliability, performance, and user experience. Join us in our mission to revolutionize observability and empower businesses in today's dynamic digital landscape.

What you'll do:

• Define and drive the technical vision, strategy, and architectural roadmap for core components of our observability platform, leveraging Java, microservices architecture, Kafka, stream processing technologies (preferably Flink), and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) to deliver industry-leading solutions.
• Lead the design, development, and deployment of robust, efficient, and highly scalable systems, ensuring adherence to best practices in software engineering, code quality, and operational excellence.
• Act as a principal subject matter expert and technical evangelist, providing strong technical leadership, guidance, and mentorship to a team of talented software engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate closely with product management, design leadership, and other engineering leaders to define product strategy, translate complex business requirements into scalable technical designs, and ensure successful execution of key initiatives using Kubernetes for container orchestration.
• Champion advanced problem-solving methodologies and leverage deep expertise in data structures and algorithms to architect and implement innovative and optimized solutions for complex technical challenges.
• Establish and enforce best practices for version control systems like Git (with platforms such as GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket) and build automation tools like Maven/Gradle across the engineering team.
• Stay at the forefront of industry trends, emerging technologies, and advancements in observability, distributed systems, and cloud computing, actively researching, prototyping, and advocating for the adoption of new solutions to enhance our platform.
• Proactively identify and address systemic performance bottlenecks, lead initiatives for platform optimization, and ensure the highest levels of stability, availability, and scalability.
• Cultivate a dynamic and collaborative engineering culture that values continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and professional development.
• Drive the hiring, and onboarding process for new engineers, contributing to building a high-performing team.
• Own and manage technical debt by identifying areas for refactoring and improvement, and strategically prioritizing this work alongside new feature development.
• Represent the team's technical strategy, roadmap, and challenges in broader engineering, architectural, and stakeholder forums.
• Champion and implement robust security best practices (DevSecOps) throughout the software development lifecycle, ensuring the security and integrity of the platform.
• Lead incident response efforts and conduct thorough post-mortem analyses for critical production issues, driving the implementation of preventative measures and continuous improvement.

This role requires:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Development, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with a significant portion dedicated to designing, building, and leading the development of large-scale, distributed systems.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow a team of software engineers, guiding them towards technical excellence, fostering their career development, and ensuring the delivery of high-quality, impactful software.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java and extensive experience in designing and implementing complex microservices-based architectures.
• Deep hands-on experience with major cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, including expertise in their compute, storage, networking, and data services.
• Strong architectural understanding and practical experience with Kubernetes and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker).
• Mastery of Kafka for building high-throughput, real-time data pipelines and event-driven architectures.
• Significant experience with stream processing technologies, preferably Apache Flink, or alternatives like Spark Streaming.
• Proficiency with version control systems (e.g., Git) and hosting platforms (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket), and experience setting standards for their use.
• Extensive experience with build tools like Maven or Gradle and establishing/improving CI/CD pipelines.
• Demonstrated expertise in architecting, designing, developing, and maintaining highly scalable, resilient, and distributed systems capable of handling massive data volumes and high throughput.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills, a strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and system design principles.
• In-depth understanding of scalable distributed systems, microservices patterns, and cloud-native architectures, with the ability to design and implement solutions that meet stringent performance, reliability, and scalability requirements.
• Passion for exploring new technologies and finding creative, efficient solutions to complex problems, keeping up with industry trends and advancements in observability and related domains.
• Excellent collaboration, influencing, and communication abilities, with the capacity to work effectively with cross-functional senior leadership, articulate complex technical strategies clearly, and inspire engineering teams.
• Proven ability to stay current with a broad range of technologies including AWS/Azure/GCP, serverless computing, Docker, Kubernetes, and evolving microservices patterns.
• Proven experience working effectively in Agile/Scrum or other iterative development methodologies.
• Demonstrated ability to influence cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders effectively, even without direct authority.
• Experience in cloud cost management, optimization strategies, and budget considerations for technical projects.
• Strong understanding of software security principles (e.g., OWASP Top 10) and experience integrating security best practices into system design and development processes.

Good to have skills:

• Experience with the Spring Boot framework for rapid application development.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools, particularly Terraform, for automating cloud infrastructure.
• Extensive Observability domain knowledge (advanced metrics, distributed tracing, complex logging strategies, AIOps, and alerting).

Bonus points if you have:

• Significant contributions to well-known open-source projects in relevant areas (e.g., distributed systems, stream processing, observability).
• Experience designing and implementing GraphQL schemas and federated services.
• A track record of building and maintaining extremely high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines and distributed systems in a mission-critical environment.
• Prior leadership experience working on a market-leading Observability product, especially in the SaaS vendor space.

Fostering a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment is important to us. We work hard to make everyone feel comfortable bringing their best, most authentic selves to work every day. We celebrate our talented Relics’ different backgrounds and abilities, and recognize the different paths they took to reach us – including nontraditional ones. Their experiences and perspectives inspire us to make our products and company the best they can be. We’re looking for people who feel connected to our mission and values, not just candidates who check off all the boxes. 

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application or recruiting process, please reach out to resume@newrelic.com.

We believe in empowering all Relics to achieve professional and business success through a flexible workforce model. This model allows us to work in a variety of workplaces that best support our success, including fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid.

Our hiring process

In compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work and to complete employment eligibility verification. Note: Our stewardship of the data of thousands of customers’ means that a criminal background check is required to join New Relic.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records based on individual circumstances and in accordance with applicable law including, but not limited to, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. New Relic does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with New Relic.

Candidates are evaluated based on qualifications, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, age, disability, neurodiversity, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other legally protected characteristics. 

Review our Applicant Privacy Notice at https://newrelic.com/termsandconditions/applicant-privacy-policy