Job Description
Title: Staff Software Engineer – Tech Lead
Location: Distributed (US or Canada)
Type: Full-time
Workplace: remote
Job Description:
We are open to hiring a Senior or Staff Software Engineer for this role.
What We’re Building
Honeycomb is built to help engineering teams deeply explore and understand their own production systems in real-time. 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!
In this role, you’ll be joining and leading the formation of a new full-stack product development team and serve as a Tech Lead. This team will start with helping to make Honeycomb more useful for frontend engineers. This role will also give you an opportunity to navigate ambiguity as a startup within a startup, create the ownership portfolio of a new team, and experiment with solutions for improved experiences over traditional Real User Monitoring (RUM) workflows.
Check out these links to learn more about how folks on the team talk and write about browser performance and think about observability in this space.
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
We can hire for this role in the United States and Canada.
What You’ll Do:
- Make meaningful decisions in an ambiguous space. You will drive the foundational work and roadmap for this new team and domain. With the support of your team and the larger organization, you can be creative in your problem-solving, experiment carefully, and suggest novel solutions. You’ll also help others navigate the landscape of new technologies, guiding technology choice, and adoption of best practices.
- Lead and contribute to the delivery of quality software. You will write code across the full application stack, primarily in React, TypeScript, and Golang. You’ll deliver impactful code that is well-tested to maintain a high level of code quality without spending an ever-growing amount of time maintaining those tests. You will also plan and lead these complex, multi-team, or system, long-term projects, including ones with external dependencies while collaborating with product and design.
- Support other engineers within the team and beyond. As a technical leader, you’ll have opportunities to mentor other engineers as they build their skills. You’ll pair, review code, and communicate daily with your team, give and receive thoughtful feedback on Pull Requests as you work in our shared code repositories, and act as a multiplier who shares knowledge and delegates to help others grow.
- Define and influence. You’ll influence company goals and strategy, potentially identifying new business growth opportunities. You’ll also work to define and model the team’s engineering brand, process, and patterns.
What You’ll Bring:
- Deep experience in web/frontend application development. You are familiar with the challenges common with browser applications and have a sense of how to balance risks and engineering efforts and are open to learning the specific languages, skills, and technologies we use by working here.
- Experience leading teams with software in production. You have experience focused on technical leadership, defining patterns, and operational guidelines for your team or domain(s).
- A strong sense of teamwork. You have experience working with a cross-functional team. Our team follows a product triad model composed of design, product, and engineering. You will collaborate with these partners, beginning with problem discovery through solution design and delivery. We work through building small changes/experiments and then iterate based on customer interaction.
- A flexible mindset. The urgency of product delivery in a scaling business environment sometimes asks us to compromise. We need to ensure that important work gets prioritized while also ensuring that we continually address technical debt. You will consider each situation and help the team to find the right balance.
- 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.
- An interest in observability and lessons from your experience supporting production software. We maintain an on-call rotation and work hard to keep that from becoming a bad experience (read about how we track on-call health and count alerts). If you have opinions about how to maintain that, we would like to hear them. If you have struggled with supporting software in production, then we want to fold that experience into the Honeycomb product, too.
