Lead Software Engineer - Java

New Relic•Portland, OR

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are a global team of innovators and pioneers dedicated to shaping the future of observability. At New Relic, we build an intelligent platform that empowers companies to thrive in an AI-first world by giving them unparalleled insight into their complex systems. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we're looking for passionate people to join our mission. If you're ready to help the world's best companies optimize their digital applications, we invite you to explore a career with us! Your opportunity We're hiring a Lead Software Engineer for our team within New Relic's Data Platform, responsible for managing ingest into NRDB—New Relic's purpose-built telemetry datastore that ingests, stores, and retrieves metrics, events, logs, and traces at massive scale. Our team sits at the front of that pipeline, putting our work directly in the critical path for every signal that reaches a New Relic customer. As a Lead, you'll set technical direction for the team: owning architecture and design decisions, weighing the hard tradeoffs, and leading a team of engineers through resolving complex problems in high-throughput distributed systems. You'll coach and grow the engineers around you, work closely with product and partner teams to translate roadmap priorities into technical plans, and represent the team's technical point of view beyond it by contributing to standards and shared resources used throughout New Relic. We operate a fleet of Kubernetes-managed services built primarily in Java, with Kafka as the backbone for inter-service communication and a cell-based architecture. In doing so, our team solves engineering challenges and works with data at a scale rarely matched in the industry. If the idea of working on complex systems that process millions of messages per second and handle petabytes of data excites you, then you may be an excellent fit!

Requirements

7–10 years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading or acting as a technical lead for a team or major initiative
Deep fluency in Java or a comparable OOP language, with the ability to ramp quickly across other languages and frameworks the team uses
Experience running stateful distributed services in production under unpredictable load, including debugging complex failure states and captaining incident remediation efforts
Experience leading architecture and design reviews for complex systems
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD tooling (Argo CD or similar), event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar) and container orchestration (Kubernetes or similar)
Experience with data modeling and query optimization against relational databases at scale
A track record of mentoring engineers and giving feedback that improves a team's output, not just your own
Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to make a technical case to non-technical stakeholders

Nice To Haves

Infrastructure-as-code experience across multiple environments and cloud providers (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
Experience querying or reasoning about time-series or telemetry data (e.g., NRQL, PromQL, or similar)
Experience with formal SRE practices — Managing SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning, or chaos/failure testing at scale
Secure-by-default design experience (OWASP familiarity, secure coding practices, tools like Snyk/SonarQube)
Contributions to open source projects

Responsibilities

Weigh tradeoffs between performance, maintainability, and operational cost when making architecture calls for our ingest systems
Scope, estimate, and own delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects from design to GA
Evaluate and introduce new tools, patterns, and technologies for the team — including LLM-assisted development practices where they are a logical fit
Stay hands-on — write and ship production code regularly alongside the team you lead
Develop engineers through code review, technical feedback, and career mentorship
Communicate technical risk and tradeoffs in terms stakeholders can act on
Own the operational health of the systems you lead — CI/CD, observability, and incident response
Spot gaps in our tools, documentation, or team coverage — and make sure they get closed