About the role
We are a global team of innovators and pioneers dedicated to shaping the future of observability. At New Relic, we build an intelligent platform that empowers companies to thrive in an AI-first world by giving them unparalleled insight into their complex systems. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we're looking for passionate people to join our mission. If you're ready to help the world's best companies optimize their digital applications, we invite you to explore a career with us!
Your opportunity
We're hiring a Lead Software Engineer for our team within New Relic's Data Platform, responsible for managing ingest into NRDB—New Relic's purpose-built telemetry datastore that ingests, stores, and retrieves metrics, events, logs, and traces at massive scale. Our team sits at the front of that pipeline, putting our work directly in the critical path for every signal that reaches a New Relic customer.
As a Lead, you'll set technical direction for the team: owning architecture and design decisions, weighing the hard tradeoffs, and leading a team of engineers through resolving complex problems in high-throughput distributed systems. You'll coach and grow the engineers around you, work closely with product and partner teams to translate roadmap priorities into technical plans, and represent the team's technical point of view beyond it by contributing to standards and shared resources used throughout New Relic.
We operate a fleet of Kubernetes-managed services built primarily in Java, with Kafka as the backbone for inter-service communication and a cell-based architecture. In doing so, our team solves engineering challenges and works with data at a scale rarely matched in the industry. If the idea of working on complex systems that process millions of messages per second and handle petabytes of data excites you, then you may be an excellent fit!
What you'll do
- Weigh tradeoffs between performance, maintainability, and operational cost when making architecture calls for our ingest systems
- Scope, estimate, and own delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects from design to GA
- Evaluate and introduce new tools, patterns, and technologies for the team — including LLM-assisted development practices where they are a logical fit
- Stay hands-on — write and ship production code regularly alongside the team you lead
- Develop engineers through code review, technical feedback, and career mentorship
- Communicate technical risk and tradeoffs in terms stakeholders can act on
- Own the operational health of the systems you lead — CI/CD, observability, and incident response