Software Architect - Open Instrumentation (Remote)

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

We are excited to consider a remote engineer for this role in the Pacific Standard Time zone. If you are not in the PST zone you must be willing to work within our core hours. Remote team members will work out of their home office and should have successfully worked remotely previously.

Your opportunity:

The Open Instrumentation group is hiring an experienced software engineer and technical leader to join our architecture team. You’ll be responsible for helping New Relic provide a consistent customer experience without regard to the underlying technology stack or language idiosyncrasies. You’ll work closely with engineering and product leadership, along with members of the open source community, to provide architectural expertise, design mentorship and improve awareness of technical dependencies. You’ll lead your fellow engineers in driving improvements to engineering practices and challenge the entire company to adopt the open source values of visiblity and “do-ocracy.”

If you’ve spent years (decades?) designing and building high-availability, high-scale, production systems, we want to talk with you! You had plenty of front-line experience in the past, but now you’re more interested in how sophisticated systems work together to achieve business outcomes. You’ve made mistakes (probably lots of them) and learned from them. You’ve also been a part of great successes where you've kept the customer front-and-center in your designs.

What you’ll do:

Our Architects are leaders, not gatekeepers. They build the roadmap of where we’re going and help keep the team aligned with the product vision. We hire awesome engineers. You will help them see the future and guide our engineering teams to delivering for our customers.

We have a globally distributed development organization with teams spanning a ten-hour swath of timezones. The only way to keep all those teams in sync is through written communications. You'll need to harness your excellent written and verbal communication skills to facilitate a high level of collaboration.

In your first month, you will:

• Become familiar with APM concepts and existing user experiences and workflows through our onboarding program, demos from your peers, and independent study
• Join the OpenTelemetry community by attending special interest group meetings
• Pair with Open Instrumentation engineers to ship your first contribution
• Build alliances with engineers, peers, partners and stakeholders

In the first three months:

• Flow between high level technical strategy and low-level coding to enable rapid prototyping and proof of concepts
• Author architectural proposals analyzing benefits, risks and alternative paths
• Drive multi-functional technical alignment through the creation or review of multi-language specifications, models, designs and documentation
• Provide technical leadership for new feature development and collaborate with internal users and engineering teams at New Relic to complete market validation
• Cultivate an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives thrive and everyone will grow. You might do this through collaborating and demonstrating listening by default to encourage experimental thinking, discussions, and debates.

In the first six months:

• Develop a deep understanding of our customers’ problem domains and use this knowledge to influence the products we bring to market
• Be the “voice of engineering” as an active advocate for engineering priorities and roadmaps through collaborating with engineers, engineering management and product management
• Maintain a strong situational awareness of our corporate priorities and active initiatives as well as emerging industry projects and standards - you might do this through attending and representing group interests at various meetings, working group sessions, blogging or conference talks
• Help evaluate technical contributions and abilities of current and prospective engineers through the performance management and interviewing process

Must haves:

• 6+ years software development experience in a wide range of languages and technologies. Ideally with depth in Java, streaming architectures, and high throughput systems.
• You have an aptitude for managing and driving results in multiple in-flight workstreams. Our internal development pace doesn’t match the slower cadence of open source software communities so you’ll need to be flexible in shifting work streams as needed to drive momentum
• You want to be in a hybrid role; you realize as an architect you primarily work through others to deliver complex solutions so you’re often in meetings driving technical discovery and decision making informed by your hands-on-keyboard prototyping experiments and PRs
• Comfortability with working in ambiguity with an intrapreneurial mentality, but seek to identify and minimize the unknown
• You’re aware of but are able to overcome organizational boundaries. You’re curious and proactive about learning how all of New Relic’s technologies operate so you can identify and navigate dependencies and build wholistic proposals
• You desire to develop in the open, collaborating with community contributors, and keeping conversations publicly visible on GitHub

Nice to haves:

• Experience with or interest in adding to and managing Open Source projects, specifically OpenTelemetry, or other open observability APIs and standards
• 2+ years hands on experience developing with Go, Node, .NET, C, PHP, Ruby, Java, and/or Python
• Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

About us:

New Relic (NYSE: NEWR) is a cloud-based platform that gives developers, engineers, operations, and management a clear view of what’s happening in today’s complex software environments. So they can find and fix problems faster, and deliver delightful experiences for their customers. That's why the world’s best engineering teams rely on New Relic to visualize, analyze, and troubleshoot their software. It’s the simplest, most powerful cloud-based observability platform, built to create more perfect software. All from one place.

Founded in 2008, we’re a global company passionate about building a culture where all employees feel a deep sense of belonging, where every ‘Relic’ can bring their whole self to work and feel supported and empowered to thrive. We’re consistently recognized as a distinguished employer and are committed to building world-class products and an award-winning culture. For more information, visit newrelic.com.

Our hiring process:

New Relic takes seriously our stewardship of the data of our thousands of customers worldwide. In compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work and to complete employment eligibility verification.