Senior Software Engineer II - Scale Team

What We’re BuildingHoneycomb 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 AreWe 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 WorkWe 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. A little more about the team:As a Senior Software Engineer II on the Scale team, you'll be joining a team that owns the horizontal product infrastructure our customers depend on as they scale. Features like authorization and access control, billing, usage reporting, and tags fall within our team scope. We're currently shaping the direction of our billing and pricing infrastructure and maturing our access control capabilities, with greenfield work ahead on customer-facing usage APIs, a major pricing and packaging overhaul, and new enterprise authorization features.What you’ll do in the role:Design, build, and deliver backend systems and APIs. You’ll architect and implement backend services and APIs in Go, emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and backward compatibility. You’ll think proactively about cost, scale, and risk — anticipating technical issues and exploring alternatives and tradeoffs thoroughly. Build and maintain full-stack product features. You’ll contribute frontend (React/TypeScript) and backend (Go) code to build robust product features, maintaining proficiency across the stack. You’ll deliver impactful features that add value for our customers, our team, and Honeycomb overall.Collaborate across disciplines. You’ll work closely within a product triad model alongside design and product partners, from discovery through delivery, iterating quickly based on user feedback.Support and own your software in production. You’ll participate in on-call rotations to ensure reliable operations and proactively address user pain points.Provide technical leadership. You'll define patterns and operational guidelines that raise the bar for the team and beyond. You'll plan, lead, and deliver complex, multi-team projects, ensuring alignment and mentoring teammates along the way. We rotate tech lead responsibilities with each feature to allow everyone on the team to use and grow these skills.Communicate clearly and support team resilience. Regular written and verbal communication, collaboration, and feedback are foundational skills you'll use daily, supporting a healthy, effective team dynamic.What you’ll bring to the role:Deep experience designing, building, and maintaining backend systems. You have substantial expertise building backend services and APIs in Go (or similar languages), with strong opinions about system 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.Ownership and autonomy. You proactively identify problems, propose solutions, and own your projects end-to-end from initial planning to deployment and ongoing maintenance. You tackle tech debt proactively and can debug the toughest issues through the 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.Experience supporting production services. You've shipped features to production, have experience investigating and resolving production incidents, and ideally have participated in on-call rotations (see how we track on-call health).A collaborative and flexible mindset. You're comfortable working cross-functionally, pivoting priorities to address evolving customer or business needs, and maintaining strong teamwork.Clear, open communication. We see clear, thoughtful, and regular communication, including a willingness to give and receive feedba