Lead Software Engineer

We are a global team of innovators and pioneers dedicated to shaping the future of observability. At New Relic, we build an intelligent platform that empowers companies to thrive in an AI-first world by giving them unparalleled insight into their complex systems. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we're looking for passionate people to join our mission. If you're ready to help the world's best companies optimize their digital applications, we invite you to explore a career with us!

Your opportunity

At New Relic, we provide our customers real-time insights, so they can innovate faster. Our software delivers insightful observability tools across different technologies and distributed systems, enabling software engineering teams to quickly identify, understand and tackle issues, analyze performance and get the most of their software and infrastructure.

The Integrations Platform team owns New Relic's GitHub, GitHub Enterprise and ServiceNow integrations. These integrations bring third-party data into New Relic as entities, relationships and events, and power Service Architecture Intelligence (repository and team catalogs, service maps and scorecards) as well as New Relic's AI and agentic experiences.

As the Lead Software Engineer, you will set the technical direction for our new integrations platform, shared building blocks for authentication, data retrieval, webhooks, data processing, rate limiting, remediation, reconciliation, etc., that let us deliver a new integration in weeks instead of quarters. You will be the team's most senior engineer, leading by example in the collaboration, mentorship, ownership and accountability.

What you'll do

• Build a scalable platform that brings in data from dozens of integrations from thousands of customers.
• Define and drive the technical roadmap and architecture of the Integrations Platform, ensuring high availability, resilience, and operational excellence.
• Lead the design and development of reliable, event-driven Java services on Kafka and Kubernetes that ingest and synchronize data from third-party systems such as GitHub, GitHub Enterprise and ServiceNow without data loss.
• Own large, multi-engineer projects end to end, from design documents and decision records through to general availability, while staying hands-on with production code and code reviews.
• Act as the team's senior technical expert, mentoring engineers and establishing standards for code quality, testing, security, and performance.
• Own the operational health of the team's services, including observability, alerting, SLOs, on-call, and incident response, and eliminate systemic issues such as API rate limits, retry storms, and out-of-order webhook events.
• Collaborate with product management, architects, partner teams, and customers to translate business requirements into scalable technical strategies.
• Evaluate and introduce new tools and practices for the team, including AI-assisted and spec-driven development.

This role requires:

• Experience: 10+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years as the technical lead of a team or major initiative, designing and building large-scale distributed systems.
• Advanced Java Engineering: Expert-level proficiency in Java and modern backend frameworks (Spring Boot, or similar), with strong knowledge of concurrency, REST API design, and JVM performance.
• Event-Driven Systems: Hands-on experience with Apache Kafka (or similar).
• Cloud Architecture: Hands-on experience running services in the cloud, preferably AWS, with strong working knowledge of Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, and observability.
• System Design: Exceptional problem-solving skills with a strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, resilient microservices design, relational data modeling, and SQL.
• Technical Leadership: Proven track record of defining technical vision, mentoring engineers, and successfully leading the delivery of mission-critical systems.
• Collaborate with cross-functional leadership to translate complex business requirements into highly scalable technical strategies.
• Communication: Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain technical trade-offs to engineers, product managers, and customers.

Good to have skills:

• Experience building integrations with third-party APIs and webhooks, such as GitHub or GitHub Enterprise (GitHub Apps, REST and GraphQL APIs), ServiceNow (CMDB, incidents), or Jira.
• Familiarity with integration patterns such as OAuth and token management, rate limiting and back-off, webhooks, polling, and incremental synchronization.
• Experience utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, and secrets management tools such as Vault.
• Experience establishing and improving CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps best practices.

Bonus points if you have

• Observability Domain Expertise: Understanding of the MELT stack (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces), OpenTelemetry (OTel) standards, and entity, relationship, or graph data models.
• AI-Assisted Engineering: Practical experience with AI coding assistants and spec-driven development, or building LLM and agent integrations (for example, MCP).
• Customer-Facing Experience: Experience handling enterprise customer escalations or working directly with customers on technical solutions.
• Contributions to open-source projects in integrations, distributed systems, or developer tooling.

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Qualified applicants may inquire about visa sponsorship (including transfer of a current H-1B visa), but the company does not support or sponsor O-1, F-1, or J-1 visas, or candidates who require commencement of an H-1B "cap case" petition for future work authorization. This position is to be filled as soon as possible.

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Fostering a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment is important to us. We work hard to make everyone feel comfortable bringing their best, most authentic selves to work every day. We celebrate our talented Relics’ different backgrounds and abilities, and recognize the different paths they took to reach us - including nontraditional ones. Their experiences and perspectives inspire us to make our products and company the best they can be. We’re looking for people who feel connected to our mission and values, not just candidates who check off all the boxes. 

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application or recruiting process, please reach out to [email protected].

We believe in empowering all Relics to achieve professional and business success through a flexible workforce model. This model allows us to work in a variety of workplaces that best support our success, including fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid.

Our hiring process

In compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work and to complete employment eligibility verification. Note: Our stewardship of the data of thousands of customers means that a criminal background check is required to join New Relic.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records based on individual circumstances and in accordance with applicable law including, but not limited to, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. New Relic does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with New Relic.

New Relic develops and distributes encryption software and technology that complies with U.S. export controls and licensing requirements. Certain New Relic roles require candidates to pass an export compliance assessment as a condition of employment in any global location. If relevant, we will provide more information later in the application process.

Candidates are evaluated based on qualifications, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, age, disability, neurodiversity, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other legally protected characteristics. 

Review our Applicant Privacy Notice at  https://newrelic.com/termsandconditions/applicant-privacy-policy