What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer: Database Backend position at Observe, Inc.?
What We Do
Observe is a SaaS observability platform that enables Engineering and DevOps teams to troubleshoot modern distributed applications 10x faster. We consolidate machine-generated data from applications and transform it into actionable, human-understandable insights. The Runtime team, part of our broader Backend organization, owns Observe's core data transformation pipelines and user query execution paths. Our systems process petabytes of data daily and execute over 200 million queries on Snowflake each day.
The Role
You'll be joining our Runtime team to work on our advanced execution features like token indices. You'll also be responsible for analyzing our diverse set of user and system generated queries to identify bottlenecks in execution drive the improvements in that area. In doing so, you'll partner with our engineering contacts in Snowflake and are responsible to clearly communicate our asks to internal as well as external stakeholders. You'll excel in this role if you are able to quickly dive deep into our platform and drive performance analyses both for individual issues and on a large scale by analyzing terabytes of data. In everything you are doing you will rely on your solid engineering skills, especially leveraging your applied database experience.
What You'll Do
Requirements
Observe is a SaaS observability platform that enables Engineering and DevOps teams to troubleshoot modern distributed applications 10x faster. We consolidate machine-generated data from applications and transform it into actionable, human-understandable insights. The Runtime team, part of our broader Backend organization, owns Observe's core data transformation pipelines and user query execution paths. Our systems process petabytes of data daily and execute over 200 million queries on Snowflake each day.
The Role
You'll be joining our Runtime team to work on our advanced execution features like token indices. You'll also be responsible for analyzing our diverse set of user and system generated queries to identify bottlenecks in execution drive the improvements in that area. In doing so, you'll partner with our engineering contacts in Snowflake and are responsible to clearly communicate our asks to internal as well as external stakeholders. You'll excel in this role if you are able to quickly dive deep into our platform and drive performance analyses both for individual issues and on a large scale by analyzing terabytes of data. In everything you are doing you will rely on your solid engineering skills, especially leveraging your applied database experience.
What You'll Do
- Maintain and improve existing advanced execution features like token indices
- Work on automated adjustments of system parameters to reduce query execution times and costs
- Analyze millions of queries to understand shortcomings in our performance, propose improvements, and drive their implementation
- Partner with our cloud service provider Snowflake on improving our performance by troubleshooting issues with their support but also by by discussing feature requests with their product managers
- Investigate and resolve customer-reported query issues
Requirements
- 3 years of industry experience building distributed systems
- Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and optimizing backend infrastructure features
- Proven ability to diagnose and resolve database performance issues
- Customer-focused mindset with the ability to translate user needs into technical solutions
- Ability to rapidly onboard to complex systems and drive meaningful improvements
- Experience with Snowflake or other cloud data warehouses
- Prior work on observability platforms
- Advanced degree in Computer Science with a focus on databases