Lead Java Engineer — Data Platform & Ingest

New Relic; Portland (OR); Hybrid; USD 186,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

Dental

Vision

Parental leave

Mental health benefits

401(k) plan

Paid holidays

Volunteer time-off

Job summary

New Relic is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for the Data Platform team responsible for managing ingest into NRDB, New Relic's telemetry datastore that stores metrics, events, logs, and traces at massive scale. You will set technical direction, own architecture decisions, and lead engineers through complex problems in high-throughput distributed systems.

This role emphasizes mentoring, partnering with product and partner teams, contributing to standards, and shaping the team's technical

Qualifications

• 7–10 years of professional software engineering experience with 2+ years in a technical lead role.
• Fluent in Java or a comparable OOP language; ability to ramp across other languages.
• Experience running stateful distributed services in production and incident remediation.
• Experience leading architecture and design reviews for complex systems.
• Hands-on with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD tooling, event-driven architectures, and container orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Weigh tradeoffs between performance, maintainability, and cost in ingest systems.
• Scope and own delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects from design to GA.
• Evaluate and introduce new tools, patterns, and technologies for the team—LLM-assisted practices included.
• Stay hands-on—write and ship production code regularly with the team.
• Develop engineers through code review and mentorship.
• Communicate technical risk and tradeoffs to stakeholders.
• Own the operational health of the systems—CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Spot gaps in tools/documentation and ensure they close.

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Leadership

Architecture reviews

Cloud

CI/CD

Kafka

Kubernetes

SQL/Relational DB

Mentoring

Communication

LLM-assisted development

Tools

Argo CD

Kafka

Kubernetes

Job description

New Relic is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for the Data Platform team responsible for managing ingest into NRDB, New Relic's telemetry datastore that stores metrics, events, logs, and traces at massive scale. You will set technical direction, own architecture decisions, and lead engineers through complex problems in high-throughput distributed systems.

This role emphasizes mentoring, partnering with product and partner teams, contributing to standards, and shaping the team's technical