Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

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. #LI-Remote

A little more about the team:

Honeycomb's Forward Deployed Engineers are among our most senior technical field engineers. They work with customers in two modes. As long-term partners, they own the customer's data strategy: pipelines, sampling, instrumentation standards, and governance. As embedded engineers, they build and ship real outcomes on the customer's platform, such as the SLOs and boards that protect a critical user journey. The same engineer does both: keeps the data healthy, and shows what it's for..

 

What you’ll do in the role:

• Lead customers in the strategic application of Honeycomb and Observability practices to meet their stated technical and business goals, including shaping how their telemetry data is structured, governed, and used across their organization
• Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to articulate the Honeycomb value proposition, vision, and strategy at the executive and technical levels
• Act as a trusted advisor on telemetry schema design and data modeling, helping customers think through how to structure events, attributes, and relationships so their data is queryable, meaningful, and durable over time
• Become a subject-matter expert in the practice of Sampling and the operations of our Refinery sampling, advising customers on sampling strategies that balance cost, fidelity, and operational insight
• Work hands-on with, teach, coach, and mentor engineering teams and leaders in Observability, SRE concepts, and instrumentation best practices
• Advise customers on how to establish and evolve telemetry ownership and standards within their engineering organizations, including how to build internal documentation, naming conventions, and attribution practices that scale
• Troubleshoot and develop both technical and sociotechnical solutions to customer issues in ways that discrete roles (like Support and Engineering teams) cannot
• Create high-quality, reusable content including trainings, talks, blog posts, white papers, demos, and reference architectures
• Scope a flagship outcome with the customer and agree upfront what success looks like
• Build and ship working instrumentation, SLOs, and boards that run in production.
• Own the outcome from scoping through to the moment it matters in production
• Hand over patterns, documentation, and enablement so the customer's team can repeat and extend the work
• Represent the voice of the customer in internal meetings with Engineering and Product Management, bringing pattern-level insights from the field
• Stay current on Honeycomb technologies, product offerings, and the broader observability ecosystem

What you’ll bring to the role:

• Deep understanding of OpenTelemetry, its projects, components, SDKs, and ecosystem, along with the ability to guide customers through complex instrumentation decisions
• Strong intuition for how telemetry data should be modeled and organized: what makes an event schema useful vs. noisy, how to think about cardinality, and how to design for long-term queryability
• The ability to understand an application's architecture and flow well enough to instrument it effectively and advise others doing the same
• Working knowledge of popular cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Infrastructure-as-Code tooling (Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm), and CI/CD platforms and practices (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc.)
• Previous experience in Software Development or System Operations, with a strong preference for candidates who have worked on distributed systems at scale
• Fluency in at least one of: Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, or .NET, familiarity with multiple languages and/or frameworks is a strong plus
• Excellent written and verbal technical communication skills, with the ability to tailor depth and framing for both engineering teams and technical leadership
• Ability to take a loosely defined goal, scope it into a concrete deliverable, and ship it
• Comfort moving between long-horizon advisory work and short, focused delivery engagements

Bonus points for:

• Previous experience in Customer Success, Technical Account Management, Sales Engineering, or Consulting
• Deep understanding of Distributed Tracing concepts (Context Propagation, Sampling, Visualization, etc.)

On Target Earnings (OTE) based on level of experience (Base + Commission)$155,000—$210,000 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