Little more about the team:

The OpenTelemetry team works in collaboration with the open source community to advance the standard for observability. You will help us build and improve open source SDKs and tools across a variety of programming languages, work with open standards around tracing and instrumentation, and enable our customers to quickly and easily get their most valuable data into Honeycomb. You will contribute to a vibrant open source community and work directly with customers to influence changes to our products.

What you’ll do in the role:

• Build open-source libraries and integrations with OpenTelemetry. You will work on new and existing tools that generate telemetry data, including Honeycomb libraries and other open-source projects. You will help ensure the ongoing success of the broader observability ecosystem.
• Create a good developer experience. You’ll be working to innovate and improve tooling across the ecosystem to reduce the burden placed on end users. You’ll do well if you are the kind of engineer who enjoys thinking about how to make code and documentation that other engineers are delighted to work with.
• Collaborate with community, and peers. You’ll be working with open-source community members, and other Honeycomb R&D members including product, engineering, and design. The best candidate is probably someone who enjoys collaborating to help ensure a stellar experience in our product across a variety of areas.
• Scope and deliver projects independently. You’re comfortable breaking down complex problems into achievable steps, surfacing trade-offs, and pulling in teammates when needed. You take ownership end-to-end—from design to production support—reducing toil and ensuring delivering measurable customer and business impact.
• Help increase the adoption of OpenTelemetry. You will work with a wide variety of teams to assist them in identifying areas where adopting OpenTelemetry may benefit them. You will increase awareness of the project and its influence in the community through engagement and documentation.

What you’ll bring to the role:

• An interest in observability. You’re curious about tooling that helps you understand what your code does in production. You may have some experience with those tools, and have thoughts about how they fit into developer practice.
• Clear, open communication. We see clear, thoughtful, and regular written & face-to-face communication (including a willingness to give & receive feedback) as a fundamental engineering skill and one of the strongest predictors of future engineering impact, not just a nice to have, and we hope you do too.
• Experience being a polyglot. You are fluent in a few popular programming languages, have worked in a multi-language environment before, and have a sense for when to favor consistency across codebases vs. when to use language-specific idioms.
• Love for being a generalist. We’re a small team at Honeycomb, so there will be plenty of opportunities to jump around and help out with other areas of our engineering and product efforts as well — the ideal candidate would probably enjoy a bit of variety in their work and not find it too distracting to help out with other projects from time to time.
• Some solid professional experience as a software engineer or in a related role, advancing beyond an entry-level position (> 4 years of professional experience).
• Strong sense of teamwork. By working as a member of an effective team our shared objectives are consistently reached, our users benefit from our rapid delivery, we grow together by sharing knowledge, and we ensure that every team member can get the rest and time away they need.