Principal Software Engineer

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
If you love to build distributed systems at scale and are a technical leader who is passionate about keeping your hands on the keyboard, read on. We are looking for engineers who have spent years building and supporting large distributed systems that are innovative, scalable, reliable, and performant.

It is an exciting time to be working in the Observability space DevOps, containerization, cloud-native computing, and new open-source standards like Open Telemetry are driving explosive growth in telemetry data. New Relic is a leader in this space that has been growing rapidly to meet this demand and to provide our customers with a world-class solution for surfacing deep, correlated, and real-time insights across any telemetry source at enterprise volume, from anywhere. We ingest petabytes of data per day, billions of data points per minute, serve billions of web requests, and process millions of messages per second.

What You'll Do
Principal engineers play a critical role in our engineering organization. We believe in small teams aligned around functionally related services. This engineer will assist teams when they need extra capacity or are tackling particularly important or ambitious problems.

• Engage, embed, and go deep with teams on high-impact projects.
• Do run-ahead research and build prototypes for new features or to optimize existing systems for performance or cost.
• Coach and mentor the teams you collaborate with and develop balanced, maintainable solutions that leave teams healthier than before.
• Contribute to cross-team initiatives and promote standards and information sharing between teams.

What Your Playground Will Look Like

• 100s of predominantly Java services with one of the largest Kafka backbones in the world.
• A multi-cloud (Kubernetes) environment spanning thousands of nodes and accepting 10s of billions of HTTP requests a day.
• Our massively scalable, purpose-built telemetry database, NRDB.

This role requires
If you are considering this role you are likely a seasoned and esteemed contributor in your past endeavours and are looking for a new challenge.

• 14+ years of professional software development experience
• Proven track record of senior technical leadership
• Knowledge of fundamentals required to build and operate highly-available software and data pipelines at scale including data structures, architectural patterns, distributed systems and supporting toolchains.
• Strong interpersonal skills, including the ability to seek consensus, provide technical leadership, lead by example, exhibiting patience and determination.
• Ability to rapidly come up to speed on new teams and services to make decisive organizational and technical impact.

Bonus points if you have
The ideal candidate will have expertise in one or more of the below areas and is energized by building expertise in some of the others.

• Experience with Java
• Experience with observability tools and platforms (such as ours)
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerization
• Exposure to cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP)

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Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Qualified applicants may inquire about visa sponsorship (including transfer of a current H-1B visa), but the company does not support or sponsor O-1, F-1, or J-1 visas, or candidates who require commencement of an H-1B "cap case" petition for future work authorization. This position is to be filled as soon as possible.

Fostering a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment is important to us. We work hard to make everyone feel comfortable bringing their best, most authentic selves to work every day. We celebrate our talented Relics' different backgrounds and abilities, and recognize the different paths they took to reach us – including nontraditional ones. Their experiences and perspectives inspire us to make our products and company the best they can be. We're looking for people who feel connected to our mission and values, not just candidates who check off all the boxes.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application or recruiting process, please reach out to

We believe in empowering all Relics to achieve professional and business success through a flexible workforce model. This model allows us to work in a variety of workplaces that best support our success, including fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid.

Our hiring process
In compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work and to complete employment eligibility verification. Note: Our stewardship of the data of thousands of customers means that a criminal background check is required to join New Relic.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records based on individual circumstances and in accordance with applicable law including, but not limited to, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. New Relic does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with New Relic.

New Relic develops and distributes encryption software and technology that complies with U.S. export controls and licensing requirements. Certain New Relic roles require candidates to pass an export compliance assessment as a condition of employment in any global location. If relevant, we will provide more information later in the application process.

Candidates are evaluated based on qualifications, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, age, disability, neurodiversity, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other legally protected characteristics.

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