Principal Software Development Engineer (Observability)

TL;DR

Principal Software Development Engineer (Observability): Leading the architecture, design, and implementation of a centralized, scalable, and cost-effective observability platform with an accent on highly scalable and resilient telemetry pipelines, OpenTelemetry adoption, platform governance, and infrastructure automation. Focus on elevating observability best practices, unifying tooling, and providing technical leadership and mentorship across the engineering organization.

Location: Onsite in San Jose, California

Salary: $242,000.00 to $338,500.00 in San Jose

Company

hirify.global powers global travel for everyone, designing cutting-edge technology to make travel smoother and creating groundbreaking solutions for partners.

What you will do

• Architect and build core telemetry pipelines, evolving the platform to handle a 10x increase in data volume.
• Spearhead the strategy, rollout, and support for OpenTelemetry collector adoption across thousands of services.
• Implement platform governance, cost allocation, and resource management within the observability platform.
• Act as a thought leader to elevate the practice of observability and improve the developer experience.
• Author and maintain production-grade Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools like Terraform and/or Crossplane.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor senior engineers, and lead architecture review sessions.
• Serve as the final escalation point for complex, cross-cutting production incidents related to the observability platform.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on building and operating large-scale distributed systems, infrastructure automation, or configuration management.
• Deep expertise in observability principles and the "three pillars": logs, metrics, and traces.
• Strong hands-on proficiency with observability technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, and OpenTelemetry.
• Proficient in one or more of: Go, Java, Python.
• Solid understanding of cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, Docker, microservices) and major cloud platforms (AWS preferred).

Culture & Benefits

• Full benefits package, including exciting travel perks, generous time-off, and parental leave.
• Flexible work model and career development resources to fuel passion for travel.
• Fostering an open culture where everyone belongs and differences are celebrated.
• Wellness & travel reimbursement, travel discounts, and an International Airlines Travel Agent (IATAN) membership.