We help engineering teams deeply understand their own production systems through observability.
The Role
Lead the engineering team responsible for Honeycomb Private Cloud, including infrastructure, tooling, operational processes, customer deployments, and enterprise support. Partner across engineering, sales, field engineering, and support; prioritize roadmap tradeoffs; maintain operational health; and grow the team through hiring and onboarding. The role requires technical leadership across Kubernetes and AWS, customer-facing collaboration, production on-call experience, and software delivery in private cloud, on-premises, BYOC, or managed single-tenant environments.
Summary Generated by Built In
What We’re Building
Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!
If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these blog posts and Honeycomb.io press releases.
Who We Are
We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.
How We Work
We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1. #LI-Remote
Honeycomb is an observability platform that helps engineering teams understand how their software behaves in production. Our Tenant team is behind Honeycomb Private Cloud, a brand new product that allows customers to have their own Honeycomb instance.
What you'll do- Own delivery of Honeycomb Private Cloud — the infrastructure, tooling, and operational processes that let enterprise customers run Honeycomb inside their own cloud environment.
- Grow the product — we anticipate significant growth in the next year; help us meet sales goals and build relationships to support it.
- Work at the customer boundary — partner with Field Engineering, Support, and Sales on PoCs, security reviews, access negotiations, and contract asks, and help the team know when to take feedback and when to help us show the customer what good looks like.
- Lead across the org — Private Cloud depends on many engineering teams across the org. We maintain a tight drift between SaaS and Private Cloud, and this role will need to be able to understand and prioritize work that touches all parts of our engineering org.
- Feedback loops for developers. We learn a lot about Honeycomb as a product while building Honeycomb. Ensure that we push Private-Cloud-inspired tooling back into our SaaS infrastructure so each side continues to make the other better.
- Build the team — grow and develop a small, tenured, senior, very high-context team; remove the single points of failure that come with that; hire and onboard the next engineers to scale the team as the product offering scales.
- 1+ year as an Engineering manager for a highly technical, senior team.
- You have a solid track record as an engineer, influencing without authority, and leaving things better than you found them.
- You've managed or led a team that carried a real production on-call rotation, and you treat operational health as a core requirement.
- Experience shipping and operating software in environments you don't fully control — on-prem, private cloud, BYOC, or managed single-tenant. You know what version skew, partial telemetry, and customer security constraints do to a roadmap.
- Enough Kubernetes and AWS fluency to review a design, ask the challenging questions, and be useful in an incident review. You don't need to be the person writing the Terraform.
- Comfort being customer-facing with enterprise buyers: security questionnaires, access models, procurement, escalations.
- Ruthless prioritization on a small team with an enormous surface area — you can name what you decided not to do, and why.
- Hiring and onboarding engineers into a domain with a steep ramp.
- Comfort with AI tooling, and a point of view on where it helps and where it doesn't.
Bonus points
- Familiarity with observability / OpenTelemetry (Honeycomb's domain).
- You're still hands-on and enjoy contributing to and reviewing code (welcome, but it won't be your primary role here).
- Background in Go, Terraform, Kafka, and large-scale data infrastructure.
- FedRAMP, GovCloud, or regulated-industry compliance experience.
- A field-adjacent past — solutions architecture, consulting, or deployment engineering.
Base Salary based on level of experience
$208,260—$234,000 USD
What you'll get when you join the Hive:
- A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
- It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
- Time to recharge with unlimited PTO
- A distributed-first mindset and culture (really!)
- Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
- Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents
- Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
- Annual development allowance
- And much more...
Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.
Phishing and Recruitment Scam Warning:
We take your security seriously. Please be aware that recruitment scams are increasingly common and scammers may create email addresses or websites to impersonate Honeycomb employees. To help protect you:
- All communications will come from an @honeycomb.io email address
- We occasionally work with external recruiting agencies. These partners will use legitimate business email addresses—never personal accounts like Gmail or Yahoo.
- Our recruiting process will never ask you to provide financial or sensitive personal information, including but not limited to:
- Social security or tax identification numbers
- Credit card numbers
- Bank account information
Diversity & Accommodations:
We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize that there is no single path to success and embrace nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.
We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our hiring process, please let your recruiter know.
As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work. If there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, we’re always open to feedback.
Privacy Notice:
If you apply for a job at Honeycomb and your application is unsuccessful (or you withdraw from the process or decline our offer), Honeycomb will retain your information after your application for a period of time in accordance with local laws. We retain this information for various reasons, including in case we face a legal challenge in respect of a recruitment decision, to consider you for other current or future jobs at Honeycomb, and to help us better understand, analyze and improve our recruitment processes.
For more information regarding our privacy practices please see the Honeycomb Privacy Notice.
If you do not want us to retain your information, or want us to update it, please contact [email protected]. Please note, however, that we may retain some information if required by law or as necessary to protect ourselves from legal claims.
Skills Required
- At least 1 year of experience as an engineering manager for a highly technical, senior team
- Strong engineering track record, including influencing without authority and improving systems or organizations
- Experience managing or leading a team with a production on-call rotation
- Experience shipping and operating software in on-premises, private cloud, BYOC, or managed single-tenant environments
- Sufficient Kubernetes and AWS fluency to review designs and participate in incident reviews
- Comfort working directly with enterprise customers on security questionnaires, access models, procurement, and escalations
- Ability to prioritize ruthlessly on a small team with a broad product and operational surface area
- Experience hiring and onboarding engineers into a steep-ramp technical domain
- Comfort with AI tooling and a point of view on appropriate use cases
- Familiarity with observability or OpenTelemetry
- Currently hands-on and interested in contributing to or reviewing code
- Background in Go, Terraform, Kafka, or large-scale data infrastructure
- FedRAMP, GovCloud, or regulated-industry compliance experience
- Background in solutions architecture, consulting, or deployment engineering
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The Company
What We Do
Honeycomb is fast analysis tool that reveals the truth about how users experience your code in complex and unpredictable environments. Within seconds, find patterns and outliers across billions of rows of data to definitively solve problems. Learn more about us here: https://www.honeycomb.io/about/
Why Work With Us
We believe Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future. Within the industry, we are passionate about consumer-quality developer tools and excited to build a product that raises our industry’s expectations of what our tools can do for us. Inside Honeycomb, we care deeply about our culture, transparency, and inclusion.
