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Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry

Snowflake Inc.· Engineering
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US-CA-Menlo Park$200k - $287.5kFull-timePosted 5mo ago

About the role

Senior Software Engineer on the OpenTelemetry team within Observe by Snowflake, focusing on open-source telemetry, instrumentation, and upstream contributions to OpenTelemetry across emerging domains (LLM/AI observability, Browser RUM, etc.).

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.

Skills

Required:OpenTelemetry experienceGo programmingSDK language familiarity
Nice to have:Open-source collaboration

Benefits

  • (Not explicitly listed in the description outside of general Snowflake incentives; salary range provided)
  • $200K – $287.5K compensation range listed.
Last updated Jul 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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