Lead Software Engineer

Your opportunity

At New Relic, we provide our customers real-time insights, so they can innovate faster. Our software delivers insightful observability tools across different technologies and distributed systems, enabling software engineering teams to quickly identify, understand and tackle issues, analyze performance and get the most of their software and infrastructure.

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.

At New Relic, you will architect and build the massive-scale streaming data platform that powers our industry-leading observability ingestion pipelines. Join us in our mission to revolutionize observability by engineering systems that process massive data volumes with extreme throughput and low latency.

What you'll do:

Define and drive the architectural roadmap for our core observability ingestion pipelines, ensuring high availability, resilience, and operational excellence.

Lead the design and development of highly concurrent, distributed systems using advanced Java, Kafka, and cloud-native technologies.

Act as the principal technical expert, mentoring a team of engineers and establishing rigorous standards for code quality, testing, and performance optimization.

Architect multi-cloud infrastructure solutions, optimizing primarily for AWS while leveraging Azure for cross-cloud compatibility and routing.

Proactively identify and eliminate systemic bottlenecks through JVM tuning, advanced concurrency management, and efficient data structure design.

Collaborate with cross-functional leadership to translate complex business requirements into highly scalable technical strategies.

This role requires:

Experience: 8+ years in software engineering, with a strong focus on designing and building large-scale, highly concurrent distributed systems.

Advanced Java Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in Java, including deep knowledge of JVM tuning, garbage collection optimization, concurrency, and multithreading under extreme load.

Distributed Streaming: Mastery of Apache Kafka (or AWS MSK), including deep understanding of partition strategies, consumer group rebalancing, and high-throughput tuning.

Cloud Architecture: Extensive hands-on experience with AWS compute and data services (EKS, S3) and strong architectural knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker.

System Design: Exceptional problem-solving skills with a strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and resilient microservices design.

Technical Leadership: Proven track record of defining technical vision, mentoring engineers, and successfully leading the delivery of mission-critical systems.

Good to have skills:

Familiarity with stream processing frameworks, preferably Apache Flink or Kafka Streams.

Practical experience with Azure equivalents (e.g., Event Hubs, AKS, Blob Storage).

Experience utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform for automated provisioning.

Experience establishing and improving CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps best practices.

Bonus points if you have:

Observability Domain Expertise: Deep understanding of the MELT stack (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces) and OpenTelemetry (OTel) standards.

High Cardinality Solutions: Proven experience designing systems capable of handling high-cardinality time-series data at massive scale.

Significant contributions to open-source projects in distributed systems, stream processing, or observability domains.