Senior 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

We are a global team of innovators shaping the future of observability. Our intelligent platform gives customers real-time insight into complex systems so they can innovate faster and operate reliably in an AI-first world. If you’re excited by high-throughput distributed systems and want to contribute to one of the largest and fastest-growing observability platforms, we’d love to hear from you.

Join a backend engineering team focused on building and operating JVM-based services that ingest, process, and serve massive volumes of telemetry data. You’ll work on high-scale, low-latency systems that power mission-critical observability features used by engineers worldwide.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and operate JVM-based microservices (primarily Java and Kotlin) with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability.
• Own services end-to-end: architecture, implementation, deployment, monitoring, on-call participation, and continuous improvement.
• Apply strong concurrency and performance practices: asynchronous programming, backpressure, efficient I/O, memory management, and GC tuning.
• Build and evolve event-driven systems; work with Kafka for streaming, partitioning, consumer groups, and schema evolution.Instrument services for deep observability (metrics, logs, traces), define SLIs/SLOs, and use e
• Experience with Kafka or similar streaming technologies (topic/partition strategy, consumer lag, idempotency, schema compatibility) strongly preferred.
• Proficiency with REST/gRPC API design, service-to-service communication, and resilience patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers).
• Practical experience with containers and Kubernetes, and with CI/CD pipelines.
• Track record of operating services in production: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and postmortems.
• Strong communication skills, ability to write design docs, and collaborate across teams; proficiency in rror budgets to drive reliability.
• Automate CI/CD, testing, and operational tasks; improve developer productivity with tooling and infrastructure as code.
• Collaborate with product, architecture, and cross-functional partners to deliver customer outcomes.
• Mentor peers, review designs and code, and contribute to technical standards and best practices.

This role requires

• Strong experience building and operating production-grade backend services on the JVM (Java and/or Kotlin).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems concepts (consistency, partitioning, replication, fault tolerance) and microservice design.
• Hands-on experience with asynchronous and reactive programming (e.g., CompletableFuture, Project Reactor, RxJava, Kotlin coroutines)

Bonus points if you have

• Deep JVM performance profiling and tuning experience (JFR, async-profiler, JMH).
• Experience with schema registries and serialization formats (Avro, Protobuf), and stream processing (Kafka Streams, Flink).
• Familiarity with data stores used in observability stacks (e.g., Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis) and their trade-offs at scale.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry 
• Prior technical mentorship or leadership in reliability and performance initiatives.

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

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