Senior Software Engineer (Observe by Snowflake - OpenTelemetry)

• As a Senior Software Engineer on the OpenTelemetry team, you’ll play a key role in driving Observe’s open-source strategy within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem

• You’ll work on some of the most exciting challenges in telemetry collection and instrumentation — expanding coverage into emerging domains like LLM/AI observability and Browser RUM — while collaborating closely with the OTel community to shape the standards that the industry builds on

• Pioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community, defining and building next-generation telemetry collection for emerging domains including LLM/AI inference, Browser RUM, and mobile

• Design and implement OTel Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters) and SDK instrumentation libraries that strengthen Observe’s position as a leading OTel destination

• Collaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community by contributing code, participating in SIG discussions, authoring RFCs, and reviewing pull requests to ensure high-quality contributions

• Architect and own the Observe Agent — our OTel Collector distribution — including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategy

• Contribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping define standardized telemetry schemas for new and evolving technology domains

• Work with product and field engineering teams to translate customer instrumentation challenges into upstream contributions and product features

• Represent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community — present at conferences, build relationships with maintainers at other vendors, and drive consensus on specification decisions

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance plans

• Health savings accounts

• Robust retirement plans

• Life and disability insurance

• Weekly online lunch and learns

• Virtual workout classes

• Ergonomic work-from-home equipment

• On-demand mental health and wellness programs

• Fertility benefits and family planning resources

• Generous time-off and various leave plans

• Onsite and Remote Work

• Employee discounts and pre-tax selections

• New hire equity + Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)

• Quarterly bonus or commission program- Deep understanding of OTel’s architecture: the Collector pipeline model, SDK internals, context propagation, and the semantic conventions specification process

• Experience contributing to open-source projects with multi-vendor governance — consensus-building, RFC authorship, and cross-organizational collaboration

• Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP

• Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector) and familiarity with at least one SDK language (Java, Python, JS/TS, or .NET)

• A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the observability and telemetry ecosystem

• Strong opinions on instrumentation design: what makes telemetry useful vs. noisy, and how to balance coverage with performance overhead

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries)

• LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metrics

• Approver or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP)

• Browser RUM or front-end performance instrumentation

• Designing and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operator