Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry

Snowflake is powering the era of the agentic enterprise and is seeking AI-native thinkers to reinvent how they work. As a Senior Software Engineer on the OpenTelemetry team, you'll drive Observe's open-source strategy and work on challenges in telemetry collection and instrumentation, collaborating with the OTel community to shape industry standards.

Responsibilities:

• Pioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community, defining and building next-generation telemetry collection for emerging domains including LLM/AI inference, Browser RUM, and mobile
• Design and implement OTel Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters) and SDK instrumentation libraries that strengthen Observe's position as a leading OTel destination
• Collaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community by contributing code, participating in SIG discussions, authoring RFCs, and reviewing pull requests to ensure high-quality contributions
• Architect and own the Observe Agent — our OTel Collector distribution — including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategy
• Contribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping define standardized telemetry schemas for new and evolving technology domains
• Work with product and field engineering teams to translate customer instrumentation challenges into upstream contributions and product features
• Represent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community — present at conferences, build relationships with maintainers at other vendors, and drive consensus on specification decisions

Requirements:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries)
• Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector) and familiarity with at least one SDK language (Java, Python, JS/TS, or .NET)
• Deep understanding of OTel's architecture: the Collector pipeline model, SDK internals, context propagation, and the semantic conventions specification process
• Experience contributing to open-source projects with multi-vendor governance — consensus-building, RFC authorship, and cross-organizational collaboration
• Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP
• A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the observability and telemetry ecosystem
• Strong opinions on instrumentation design: what makes telemetry useful vs. noisy, and how to balance coverage with performance overhead
• Approver or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP)
• LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metrics
• Browser RUM or front-end performance instrumentation
• Designing and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operator