Lead Software Engineer - Java

New Relic•Portland, OR

1d•$186,000 - $233,000

About The Position

New Relic is hiring a Lead Software Engineer for its Data Platform team, which manages ingest into NRDB, New Relic’s telemetry datastore for metrics, events, logs, and traces. The team operates at the front of the ingest pipeline, directly supporting signals that reach New Relic customers. It builds and runs Kubernetes-managed services primarily in Java, uses Kafka for inter-service communication, and follows a cell-based architecture to process data at very high scale. The Lead sets technical direction, owns architecture and design decisions, and guides engineers through complex distributed-systems challenges. The role combines regular hands-on production coding with project delivery, technical mentorship, collaboration with product and partner teams, and contributions to shared technical standards and resources. The position also includes responsibility for operational health, including CI/CD, observability, and incident response. The role is eligible for a corporate bonus plan. New Relic offers healthcare, dental and vision coverage, parental leave and planning, mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, flex time-off, 11 paid holidays, volunteer time-off, and other competitive benefits. The company supports fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid work arrangements. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Requirements

7–10 years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 2 years leading or acting as a technical lead for a team or major initiative.
Deep fluency in Java or a comparable object-oriented language, with the ability to ramp up quickly on other languages and frameworks.
Experience running stateful distributed services in production under unpredictable load, debugging complex failure states, and leading incident remediation.
Experience leading architecture and design reviews for complex systems.
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD tooling such as Argo CD or similar, event-driven architectures such as Kafka or similar, and container orchestration such as Kubernetes or similar.
Experience with data modeling and query optimization against relational databases at scale.
A track record of mentoring engineers and providing feedback that improves team output.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to make technical cases to non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Infrastructure-as-code experience across multiple environments and cloud providers, such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
Experience querying or reasoning about time-series or telemetry data, such as NRQL or PromQL.
Experience with formal SRE practices, including managing SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning, or large-scale chaos and failure testing.
Secure-by-default design experience, including OWASP familiarity, secure coding practices, or tools such as Snyk or SonarQube.
Contributions to open source projects.

Responsibilities

Make architecture decisions for ingest systems by weighing performance, maintainability, and operational cost.
Scope, estimate, and own delivery of complex projects involving multiple engineers, from design through general availability.
Evaluate and introduce tools, patterns, and technologies, including LLM-assisted development practices where appropriate.
Write and ship production code alongside the team.
Develop engineers through code reviews, technical feedback, and career mentorship.
Communicate technical risks and tradeoffs in actionable terms to stakeholders.
Own operational health of the systems led, including CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
Identify and address gaps in tools, documentation, or team coverage.
Contribute to technical standards and shared resources used across New Relic.