What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer: Metrics Platform 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 revolutionize how we handle metrics—one of the three pillars of observability alongside logs and traces. While we've built strong capabilities in logs and traces, we're now investing heavily in metrics to deliver a truly unified observability platform. Your focus will be two-fold: dramatically improving the scalability and performance of our existing metrics pipeline, and architecting next-generation systems that process metrics data faster and more cost-effectively than what's possible today. This role combines hands-on engineering with system design leadership.
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 revolutionize how we handle metrics—one of the three pillars of observability alongside logs and traces. While we've built strong capabilities in logs and traces, we're now investing heavily in metrics to deliver a truly unified observability platform. Your focus will be two-fold: dramatically improving the scalability and performance of our existing metrics pipeline, and architecting next-generation systems that process metrics data faster and more cost-effectively than what's possible today. This role combines hands-on engineering with system design leadership.
What You'll Do
- Design and implement scalable metrics ingestion and query systems
- Optimize our Snowflake-based metrics pipeline for performance and cost efficiency
- Investigate and resolve customer-reported issues in the metrics domain
- Collaborate with Product and Customer Success teams to understand use cases and pain points
- Prototype and evaluate new architectural approaches for metrics storage and retrieval
- Contribute to technical decisions shaping our metrics platform roadmap
Requirements
- 3 years of industry experience building distributed systems or databases
- Strong computer science fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design
- Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and optimizing database features
- 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
- Background in time-series databases (Prometheus, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, etc.)
- Prior work on observability platforms or metrics systems
- Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field