Senior Software Engineer II - App Observability

Honeycomb.io is a company focused on delivering observability tools for developers, collaborating with well-known companies across various industries. The Senior Software Engineer II will design and implement backend systems and APIs while also contributing to full-stack features, providing technical leadership, and ensuring the software's reliability in production.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and deliver backend systems and APIs
• Build and maintain full-stack product features
• Provide technical leadership
• Collaborate across disciplines
• Support and own your software in production
• Communicate clearly and multiply your impact

Requirements:

• Deep experience designing, building, and maintaining backend systems. You have substantial expertise building APIs and backend services in Go (or similar languages), with strong opinions about API design, error handling, and developer experience. You've seen many different patterns and have developed your own frameworks for evaluating how to approach new technical challenges
• Frontend proficiency with React and TypeScript. You have professional experience delivering frontend features and contributing to full-stack software through all stages of the development lifecycle, though your primary expertise is in backend systems
• Experience leading complex technical projects. You've planned and delivered projects that span multiple teams or systems, navigating external dependencies and uncertainty. You know how to break down complex work, ship incrementally, and balance technical investment with business goals
• Ownership and autonomy. You proactively identify problems, propose solutions, and own your projects end-to-end — from planning through deployment and ongoing maintenance. You tackle tech debt proactively and can debug the toughest issues through the entire stack
• A track record of making others better. You've mentored engineers, led technical design reviews, and helped raise the quality bar for a team or domain. People come to you for guidance, and you help build leaders around you
• A collaborative and flexible mindset. You're comfortable working cross-functionally, pivoting priorities to address evolving customer or business needs, and maintaining strong teamwork. We work by building small changes and iterating based on customer interaction
• Clear, open communication. We see clear, thoughtful, and regular written and face-to-face communication — including a willingness to give and receive feedback — as a fundamental engineering skill and one of the strongest predictors of engineering impact, not just a nice to have, and we hope you do too
• An interest in observability and production culture. We maintain an on-call rotation and work hard to keep it from becoming a bad experience. You've supported software in production and have opinions about how to do it well. Bonus points if you want to fold that experience into the Honeycomb product itself
• Nice to have: experience with AI-assisted development. You're proficient with AI coding tools (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) or are excited to incorporate them into your workflow. We're actively exploring how AI can accelerate our development practices