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 revolutionize how we handle metrics—one of the three pillars of observability alongside logs and traces. While we've built strong capabilities in logs and traces, we're now investing heavily in metrics to deliver a truly unified observability platform. Your focus will be two-fold: dramatically improving the scalability and performance of our existing metrics pipeline, and architecting next-generation systems that process metrics data faster and more cost-effectively than what's possible today. This role combines hands-on engineering with system design leadership.
What You'll DoDesign and implement scalable metrics ingestion and query systems
Optimize our Snowflake-based metrics pipeline for performance and cost efficiency
Investigate and resolve customer-reported issues in the metrics domain
Collaborate with Product and Customer Success teams to understand use cases and pain points
Prototype and evaluate new architectural approaches for metrics storage and retrieval
Contribute to technical decisions shaping our metrics platform roadmap
3+ years of industry experience building distributed systems or databases
Strong computer science fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, and system design
Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and optimizing database features
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
Background in time-series databases (Prometheus, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, etc.)
Prior work on observability platforms or metrics systems
Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field
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.
