Senior Software Engineer II - Storage

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><div><strong>What We’re Building</strong></div> <div>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!&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div>If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these <a href="https://www.honeycomb.io/blog" target="_blank">blog posts</a> and Honeycomb.io <a href="https://www.honeycomb.io/category/press-releases" target="_blank">press releases</a>.&nbsp;</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>Who We Are</strong></div> <div>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&nbsp;<a class="postings-link" href="https://www.honeycomb.io/about/" target="_blank"><u>our values</u></a>&nbsp;every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.</div> <div>&nbsp;</div> <div><strong>How We Work</strong></div> <div>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</div></div><h2><strong>Little more about the team:</strong></h2> <p>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.</p> <h2><strong>What you’ll do in the role:</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Build and deliver high-quality solutions.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Scope and deliver projects independently.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Collaborate with cross-functional partners.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Support our services in production.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Learn new ways to solve complex problems.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Thrive on collaboration.</strong> 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.</li> </ul> <h2><strong>What you’ll bring to the role:</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Technical leadership in storage and querying.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Curiosity and experimentation.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Focus on business outcomes.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Strength in mentorship and teamwork.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Resilience in collaboration.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Execution with impact.</strong> You can scope and deliver complex, multi-team projects while balancing production realities, proactively reducing toil, and ensuring systems deliver measurable customer value.</li> <li><strong>Deep debugging expertise.</strong> You’re trusted to diagnose and resolve the toughest production issues across the stack, restoring reliability whe