[Remote] Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Snowflake is a leading data platform that is powering the era of the agentic enterprise. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to drive Observe's open-source strategy within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem, focusing on telemetry collection and instrumentation for emerging domains like LLM/AI observability and Browser RUM.
Responsibilities
- Pioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community, defining and building next-generation telemetry collection for emerging domains including LLM/AI inference, Browser RUM, and mobile
- Design and implement OTel Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters) and SDK instrumentation libraries that strengthen Observe's position as a leading OTel destination
- Collaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community by contributing code, participating in SIG discussions, authoring RFCs, and reviewing pull requests to ensure high-quality contributions
- Architect and own the Observe Agent — our OTel Collector distribution — including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategy
- Contribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping define standardized telemetry schemas for new and evolving technology domains
- Work with product and field engineering teams to translate customer instrumentation challenges into upstream contributions and product features
- Represent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community — present at conferences, build relationships with maintainers at other vendors, and drive consensus on specification decisions
Skills
- 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries)
- Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector) and familiarity with at least one SDK language (Java, Python, JS/TS, or .NET)
- Deep understanding of OTel's architecture: the Collector pipeline model, SDK internals, context propagation, and the semantic conventions specification process
- Experience contributing to open-source projects with multi-vendor governance — consensus-building, RFC authorship, and cross-organizational collaboration
- Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP
- A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the observability and telemetry ecosystem
- Strong opinions on instrumentation design: what makes telemetry useful vs. noisy, and how to balance coverage with performance overhead
- Approver or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP)
- LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metrics
- Browser RUM or front-end performance instrumentation
- Designing and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operator
Company Overview
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