Senior Software Engineer II - Storage

What We’re Building

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023! If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these blog posts and Honeycomb.io press releases.

Who We Are

We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.

How We Work

We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1.

Little more about the team: The Storage Team at Honeycomb is the backbone of our platform, responsible for the performance, reliability, and scalability of storing and querying billions of events. We design and own the architecture that powers correct and dependable query results — enabling every product experience from Metrics to Triggers and SLOs. As a senior engineer on Storage, you’ll work on high-impact systems where our customers may never see your code directly, but they’ll rely on it every time they use Honeycomb.

What you’ll do in the role:

• Build and deliver high-quality solutions. You will design and implement solutions that power Honeycomb’s query and data storage infrastructure. Whether it’s improving query performance, evolving the Retriever service, or making our storage layer more reliable, you’re eager to jump in and add value where the team needs it most.
• Scope and deliver projects independently. You’re comfortable breaking down complex storage and querying problems into achievable steps, surfacing trade-offs, and pulling in teammates when needed. You take ownership end-to-end — from design to production support — reducing toil and ensuring our systems deliver measurable customer and business impact.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners. You’ll work closely with Product Management and other engineering teams to connect technical solutions to product needs, from problem discovery through solution design and delivery. Much of our work is behind the scenes, but it enables every Honeycomb product experience, from Metrics to Triggers and SLOs.
• Support our services in production. We believe in owning the software we build. Every engineer on Storage participates in on-call rotations, helps define team KPIs and SLOs, and proactively reduces toil by addressing reliability challenges before they reach customers.
• Learn new ways to solve complex problems. As Honeycomb grows, so do the challenges of scaling our systems. You will explore new technologies, data storage techniques, and query optimization strategies to keep performance and reliability strong at scale.
• Thrive on collaboration. You enjoy pairing, reviewing code, and offering constructive feedback. You model strong ownership and help your teammates grow, while keeping conversations forward-looking and focused on business value.

What you’ll bring to the role:

• Technical leadership in storage and querying. You’ve led the design of patterns and guidelines that improve performance and reliability, and you bring expertise in writing Go along with experience working on high-throughput or complex systems. Prior experience with database engineering is a plus, as is comfort with Kubernetes.
• Curiosity and experimentation. You learn by digging in — individually, in pairs, or as a team. You ask questions to better understand complex systems, explore trade-offs, and believe in learning from incidents as a way to improve both technology and practices.
• Focus on business outcomes. You tie technical decisions to customer and company impact, weighing whether work is necessary now or later, and considering how projects affect the broader business.
• Strength in mentorship and teamwork. You guide engineers through code reviews and help spread knowledge across a team with diverse skillsets so that ownership of critical paths is shared, not siloed.
• Resilience in collaboration. You thrive in a senior-heavy team, giving and receiving feedback with grace, and contributing to a culture where tough problems and hard conversations lead to better outcomes.
• Execution with impact. You can scope and deliver complex, multi-team projects while balancing production realities, proactively reducing toil, and ensuring systems deliver measurable customer value.
• Deep debugging expertise. You’re trusted to diagnose and resolve the toughest production issues across the stack, restoring reliability where others may be stuck.
• Influence beyond your team. You multiply impact by sharing knowledge, guiding adoption of new technologies, and driving foundational work that benefits Honeycomb engineering as a whole.

Base Salary based on level of experience $183,340 — $206,000 USD

What you'll get when you join the Hive:

• A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
• It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
• Time to recharge with unlimited PTO
• A distributed-first mindset and culture (really!)
• Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
• Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
• Annual development allowance
• And much more...

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.

Phishing and Recruitment Scam Warning:

We take your security seriously. Please be aware that recruitment scams are increasingly common and scammers may create email addresses or websites to impersonate Honeycomb employees. To help protect you:

• All communications will come from an @honeycomb.io email address
• We occasionally work with external recruiting agencies. These partners will use legitimate business email addresses— never personal accounts like Gmail or Yahoo.
• Our recruiting process will never ask you to provide financial or sensitive personal information, including but not limited to:
  • Social security or tax identification numbers
  • Credit card numbers
  • Bank account information

Diversity & Accommodations:

We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize that there is no single path to success and embrace nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.

We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our hiring process, please let your recruiter know.

As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work. If there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, we’re always open to feedback.

Privacy Notice:

If you apply for a job at Honeycomb and your application is unsuccessful (or you withdraw from the process or decline our offer), Honeycomb will retain your information after your application for a period of time in accordance with local laws. We retain this information for various reasons, including in case we face a legal challenge in respect of a recruitment decision, to consider you for other current or future jobs at Honeycomb, and to help us better understand, analyze and improve our recruitment processes.

For more information regarding our privacy practices please see the Honeycomb Privacy Notice.

If you do not want us to retain your information, or want us to update it, please contact recruiter contact. Please note, however, that we may retain some information if required by law or as necessary to protect ourselves from legal claims.