Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry

Job description

At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise. To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work. You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact. We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results. At Snowflake, your role isn't just to execute a function, but to help redefine the future of how work gets done. Observe by Snowflake is an AI-powered observability platform built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and engineered for scale. We ingest and store logs, metrics, traces, and events on an open, scalable data lakehouse using Apache Iceberg — at dramatically lower cost. OpenTelemetry is the foundation of how customers send data to Observe, and we are making significant investment in upstream OTel contributions to ensure Observe is the best destination for OTel-instrumented environments. As a Senior Software Engineer on the OpenTelemetry team, you'll play a key role in driving Observe's open-source strategy within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem. You'll work on some of the most exciting challenges in telemetry collection and instrumentation — expanding coverage into emerging domains like LLM/AI observability and Browser RUM — while collaborating closely with the OTel community to shape the standards that the industry builds on. AS A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - OBSERVE BY SNOWFLAKE, OPENTELEMETRY, YOU WILL: - Pioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community, defining and building next-generation telemetry collection for emerging domains including LLM/AI inference, Browser RUM, and mobile. - Design and implement OTel Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters) and SDK instrumentation libraries that strengthen Observe's position as a leading OTel destination. - Collaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community by contributing code, participating in SIG discussions, authoring RFCs, and reviewing pull requests to ensure high-quality contributions. - Architect and own the Observe Agent — our OTel Collector distribution — including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategy. - Contribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping define standardized telemetry schemas for new and evolving technology domains. - Work with product and field engineering teams to translate customer instrumentation challenges into upstream contributions and product features. - Represent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community — present at conferences, build relationships with maintainers at other vendors, and drive consensus on specification decisions. OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: - 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries). - Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector) and familiarity with at least one SDK language (Java, Python, JS/TS, or .NET). - Deep understanding of OTel's architecture: the Collector pipeline model, SDK internals, context propagation, and the semantic conventions specification process. - Experience contributing to open-source projects with multi-vendor governance — consensus-building, RFC authorship, and cross-organizational collaboration. - Experience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP. - A passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the observability and telemetry ecosystem. - Strong opinions on instrumentation design: what makes telemetry useful vs. noisy, and how to balance coverage with performance overhead. BONUS POINTS FOR EXPERIENCE WITH: - Approver or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP). - LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metrics. - Browser RUM or front-end performance instrumentation. - Designing and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operator. WHY JOIN THE OPENTELEMETRY TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE? - Be part of Snowflake's strategic investment in open-source observability — shaping the standards the entire industry builds on. - Work on high-impact instrumentation challenges in emerging domains (LLM/AI, Browser RUM) where conventions don't yet exist and your contributions define the path forward. - Collaborate with core OTel maintainers and some of the brightest minds in the telemetry ecosystem, with the backing and scale of one of the world's leading data platforms. - Have a direct feedback loop between your upstream contributions and enterprise customers processing petabytes of OTel data daily through Observe. Every Snowflake employee is expected to follow the company’s confidentiality and security standards for handling sensitive data. Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties. It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential. Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth. We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake. How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and benefits information: careers.snowflake.com http://careers.snowflake.com