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 RoleYou'll be joining our Runtime team to work on our advanced execution features like token indices. You'll also be responsible for analyzing our diverse set of user and system generated queries to identify bottlenecks in execution drive the improvements in that area. In doing so, you'll partner with our engineering contacts in Snowflake and are responsible to clearly communicate our asks to internal as well as external stakeholders. You'll excel in this role if you are able to quickly dive deep into our platform and drive performance analyses both for individual issues and on a large scale by analyzing terabytes of data. In everything you are doing you will rely on your solid engineering skills, especially leveraging your applied database experience.
What You'll DoMaintain and improve existing advanced execution features like token indices
Work on automated adjustments of system parameters to reduce query execution times and costs
Analyze millions of queries to understand shortcomings in our performance, propose improvements, and drive their implementation
Partner with our cloud service provider Snowflake on improving our performance by troubleshooting issues with their support but also by by discussing feature requests with their product managers
Investigate and resolve customer-reported query issues
3+ years of industry experience building distributed systems
Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and optimizing backend infrastructure features
Proven ability to diagnose and resolve database performance issues
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
Prior work on observability platforms
Advanced degree in Computer Science with a focus on databases
Top Skills
What We Do
Observe was founded by Sutter Hill Ventures in November 2017. Our founding team came from leading Enterprise SaaS and software companies that work with vast quantities of data such as Snowflake, Splunk and Wavefront.
Our founding thesis was that the enterprises are data rich, but information poor. Data is siloed making it difficult to understand what’s going on inside applications and infrastructure. The result is often a poor customer experience and wasted engineering time tracking down incidents. Oh, and it costs a fortune.
Observe discerns why applications and infrastructure are running the way they are from the data they emit. We enable engineers to spend more time coding features and less time investigating incidents. We reduce outages and issues with customer experience. And we leverage an elastic cloud architecture so that you only pay for what you use.
