Staff Engineer - Observability Platform

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to lead the design, construction, and operation of MongoDB's internal and external observability infrastructure. Our Observability stack supports tens of thousands of customers in monitoring their database clusters and triggering vital alerts to protect critical workloads.

The Collections team, a new formation within MongoDB's Observability & Adoption Organization, focuses on simplifying telemetry onboarding and data collection across MongoDB. This team manages essential components of the observability stack such as onboarding experiences, telemetry collection agents spanning data and control planes, and ingestion services handling metrics, logs, and traces. These components underpin both internal and customer-facing observability, enabling insights, recommendations, and alerting.

Our mission is to lower barriers for teams adopting and improving Observability, collaborating closely with development groups to instrument their services with best practices, establish telemetry conventions, and build systems that are robust, efficient, secure, documented, and user-centric. We coordinate with the Data Pipeline and Storage & Query teams to maintain a stable, high-performance end-to-end observability platform.

This opportunity entails shaping how Observability functions within MongoDB and influencing both the developer experience and foundational platform reliability. Our infrastructure supports massive scale; for example, processing tens of billions of metric time series and petabytes of logs and traces, utilizing technologies including VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Splunk, Flink, WarpStream/Kafka, Java, Golang, Fluentbit, and OpenTelemetry.

As a Staff Engineer, you will collaborate extensively with software engineering, product, and site reliability teams to promote best practices in instrumentation and monitoring. This role offers ownership of critical infrastructure components, with a strong emphasis on inclusivity, diversity, and teamwork. We encourage you to join us in building a faster, more reliable, and highly observable database system.

Note: Candidates should be based in Dublin to participate in our hybrid working model.

Candidate Profile

• Enthusiasm for tackling complex large-scale technical problems with high quality standards.
• At least 10 years of experience in designing, programming, debugging, and tuning distributed or highly concurrent mission-critical software systems using Go, Java, C, or C++.
• Hands-on experience managing latency-sensitive, high-throughput systems.
• Strong foundation in system-level programming, including multi-threading, performance profiling, and expert coding skills.
• Familiarity with database internals or building core components for data processing systems.
• Desirable: experience with indexing or optimizing database performance.
• Understanding of observability ecosystems and industry best practices.
• Excellent verbal and written technical communication skills with a passion for mentorship and collaboration.
• Effective time and project management abilities, including realistic estimation of project complexity and effort.
• Good knowledge of information security management.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build components for our mission-critical observability platform to enhance performance, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and resilience.
• Develop observability features that enable rapid and precise diagnosis of production issues for engineers and customers.
• Manage and resolve production customer escalations in coordination with Technical Support, mentoring team members to handle such situations.
• Write high-quality production database code, improve existing systems, and guide the team towards better coding standards.
• Own code areas maintained by the Observability team, ensuring high standards in security, durability, availability, performance, and maintainability.
• Diagnose test failures, debug and fix software issues, and prevent introduction of new bugs.
• Analyze the impact of code changes on software performance and prevent regressions.
• Participate in interviewing candidates for advanced software engineering positions.
• Maintain expertise on the latest trends in database and observability technologies from industry and academia.
• Lead development and project management of major cross-company projects.
• Work collaboratively with stakeholders and engineering teams on significant initiatives.
• Advise Product Management on technical directions, engineering complexity, and project dependencies.
• Help define product roadmaps in partnership with Product Management and Engineering leadership.
• Promote and enhance unit and integration testing to ensure software correctness.
• Join the on-call rotation, collaborating with customers and support engineers to identify and address issues.

Success Metrics

• Within the first month: grasp the overall architecture of MongoDB Observability and fix several bugs.
• Within three months: contribute to development projects aligned with upcoming major releases and resolve customer or test-reported issues.
• Within six months: assume responsibilities in code reviews and participate in design reviews for new features.
• Within twelve months: lead feature development and initiatives, mentor team engineers, and steer the Observability Team's long-term technical roadmap.

About MongoDB

MongoDB is a leading data platform empowering builders to innovate swiftly. It offers a unified data platform, widely distributed globally across major clouds, supporting modern workloads and AI-driven innovations. Serving over 67,000 customers worldwide, including 75% of Fortune 100 companies and AI-native startups, MongoDB powers the next generation of software.

The company fosters a culture based on leadership principles emphasizing decision-making, collaboration, and mutual support. Employee development is prioritized through an inclusive and enriching environment, offering affinity groups, fertility assistance, generous parental leave, and overall well-being initiatives.

MongoDB provides accommodations in its application and interview processes for individuals with disabilities and is an equal opportunity employer.