Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do. We are a fully distributed company, and our Forward Deployed Engineers are among our most senior technical field engineers. They work with customers in two modes: as long-term partners owning the customer's data strategy (pipelines, sampling, instrumentation standards, and governance), and as embedded engineers building and shipping real outcomes on the customer's platform, such as SLOs and boards that protect critical user journeys.

• Lead customers in the strategic application of Honeycomb and Observability practices to meet their technical and business goals, including shaping how telemetry data is structured, governed, and used.
• Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to articulate the Honeycomb value proposition at executive and technical levels.
• Act as a trusted advisor on telemetry schema design and data modeling.
• Become a subject-matter expert in Sampling and the operations of Refinery sampling, advising on strategies that balance cost, fidelity, and operational insight.
• Work hands-on with, teach, coach, and mentor engineering teams in Observability, SRE concepts, and instrumentation best practices.
• Advise on establishing telemetry ownership and standards, including documentation, naming conventions, and attribution practices.
• Troubleshoot and develop technical and sociotechnical solutions to customer issues.
• Create high-quality, reusable content including trainings, talks, blog posts, white papers, demos, and reference architectures.
• Scope flagship outcomes with customers and agree upfront on success criteria.
• Build and ship working instrumentation, SLOs, and boards that run in production, owning the outcome from scoping through to production.
• Hand over patterns, documentation, and enablement so customers can repeat and extend the work.
• Represent the voice of the customer in internal meetings with Engineering and Product Management.
• Stay current on Honeycomb technologies, product offerings, and the broader observability ecosystem.

• Deep understanding of OpenTelemetry, its projects, components, SDKs, and ecosystem.
• Strong intuition for telemetry data modeling: event schema usefulness, cardinality, and long-term queryability.
• Ability to understand an application's architecture and flow to instrument it effectively.
• Working knowledge of popular cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Infrastructure-as-Code tooling (Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm), and CI/CD platforms (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc.).
• Previous experience in Software Development or System Operations, with strong preference for distributed systems at scale.
• Fluency in at least one of: Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, or .NET; familiarity with multiple languages/frameworks is a plus.
• Excellent written and verbal technical communication skills.
• Ability to take a loosely defined goal, scope it into a concrete deliverable, and ship it.
• Comfort moving between long-horizon advisory work and short, focused delivery engagements.

• Previous experience in Customer Success, Technical Account Management, Sales Engineering, or Consulting.
• Deep understanding of Distributed Tracing concepts (Context Propagation, Sampling, Visualization, etc.).

On Target Earnings (OTE) based on level of experience (Base + Commission): $155,000—$210,000 USD.

Benefits include: generous equity with employee-friendly stock program, transparent pay based on levels, unlimited PTO, distributed-first culture, home office/co-working/internet stipend, full benefits coverage for employees with additional coverage for dependents, up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, annual development allowance, and more.

Apply via the Greenhouse job posting. Note: Honeycomb cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time.