Observe is a modern observability platform that helps engineering teams quickly detect, understand, and resolve issues across distributed systems. It ingests and processes massive volumes of telemetry—logs, metrics, traces, and more—to provide a unified, scalable view of system behavior. Designed for high performance and flexibility, Observe supports a wide range of use cases from incident response to performance monitoring. The company was founded by veterans of Snowflake and Splunk and is trusted by leading enterprises like Capital One and Topgolf.
About the Ingest PipelineWe build and operate a petabyte scale ingest pipeline. It is primarily implemented in C++, with supporting components in Go, and is designed to operate at massive scale with extremely high reliability and performance. This pipeline is a distributed system responsible for stream processing, batching, compression, and transport of data into our storage engine, all while enforcing backpressure and supporting real-time analytics.
What You’ll DoDesign, build, and maintain scalable, high-throughput components of Observe’s ingest pipeline.
Optimize the performance of systems that operate under high concurrency and extreme data volume.
Lead and contribute to system-level design decisions in a distributed environment.
Collaborate cross-functionally with product backend and infrastructure teams to deliver customer-facing capabilities.
Debug complex production issues involving large-scale telemetry data pipelines.
Continuously improve operational reliability, observability, and debuggability of the ingest system.
Experience in building systems or backend, ideally in high-scale or high-throughput environments.
Proficiency in C++ and/or Go in production environments.
Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals — concurrency, sharding, fault tolerance, etc.
Deep experience with performance optimization in low-latency or resource-constrained systems.
A strong sense of user empathy and product intuition — you think beyond APIs and care about end-to-end experience.
Proven ability to work collaboratively across engineering and product teams.
Prior experience building telemetry, logging, metrics, or observability infrastructure.
Experience with message queues, stream processing frameworks, or time-series databases.
Opportunity to work on a core component of Observe’s platform that directly impacts scale and reliability.
Be part of a world-class engineering culture that values performance, pragmatism, and empathy.
Tackle engineering challenges at petabyte scale in a fast-growing company.
Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits.
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.
