Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Honeycomb Enterprise; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 155,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake in Honeycomb

Unlimited PTO

Distributed-first culture

Home office stipend

Full benefits coverage for employees

Up to 16 weeks paid parental leave

Annual development allowance

Job summary

Honeycomb.io is seeking a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with customers, shaping telemetry data structures and instrumentation strategies. You will own end-to-end outcomes from scoping through production, mentoring engineering teams, and delivering measurable observability improvements.

The role emphasizes hands-on engineering with SLOs, real-time analytics, and collaborative delivery, within a distributed-first, remote-friendly culture.

Qualifications

• Experience advising on telemetry schemas and data modeling.
• Ability to instrument applications and guide teams through instrumentation decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication for both engineers and leadership.
• Experience with distributed systems at scale is highly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead customers in strategic application of Honeycomb and observability practices to meet goals.
• Collaborate with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to articulate value and strategy.
• Advise on telemetry ownership, standards, and documentation within engineering teams.
• Build and ship instrumentation, SLOs, and production-ready boards.
• Create trainings, talks, demos, and reference architectures.

Skills

OpenTelemetry

Telemetry data modeling

Cloud platforms

Distributed systems

Technical writing

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Helm

CircleCI

GitHub Actions

Job description

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!

We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.

How We Work

We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1. #LI-Remote

A little more about the team:

Honeycomb's Forward Deployed Engineers are among our most senior technical field engineers. They work with customers in two modes. As long-term partners, they own the customer's data strategy: pipelines, sampling, instrumentation standards, and governance. As embedded engineers, they build and ship real outcomes on the customer's platform, such as the SLOs and boards that protect a critical user journey. The same engineer does both: keeps the data healthy, and shows what it's for..

What you’ll do in the role:

• Lead customers in the strategic application of Honeycomb and Observability practices to meet their stated technical and business goals, including shaping how their telemetry data is structured, governed, and used across their organization
• Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to articulate the Honeycomb value proposition, vision, and strategy at the executive and technical levels
• Act as a trusted advisor on telemetry schema design and data modeling, helping customers think through how to structure events, attributes, and relationships so their data is queryable, meaningful, and durable over time
• Become a subject-matter expert in the practice of Sampling and the operations of our Refinery sampling, advising customers on sampling strategies that balance cost, fidelity, and operational insight
• Work hands-on with, teach, coach, and mentor engineering teams and leaders in Observability, SRE concepts, and instrumentation best practices
• Advise customers on how to establish and evolve telemetry ownership and standards within their engineering organizations, including how to build internal documentation, naming conventions, and attribution practices that scale
• Troubleshoot and develop both technical and sociotechnical solutions to customer issues in ways that discrete roles (like Support and Engineering teams) cannot
• Create high-quality, reusable content including trainings, talks, blog posts, white papers, demos, and reference architectures
• Scope a flagship outcome with the customer and agree upfront what success looks like
• Build and ship working instrumentation, SLOs, and boards that run in production.
• Own the outcome from scoping through to the moment it matters in production
• Hand over patterns, documentation, and enablement so the customer's team can repeat and extend the work
• Represent the voice of the customer in internal meetings with Engineering and Product Management, bringing pattern-level insights from the field
• Stay current on Honeycomb technologies, product offerings, and the broader observability ecosystem

What you’ll bring to the role:

• Deep understanding of OpenTelemetry, its projects, components, SDKs, and ecosystem, along with the ability to guide customers through complex instrumentation decisions
• Strong intuition for how telemetry data should be modeled and organized: what makes an event schema useful vs. noisy, how to think about cardinality, and how to design for long-term queryability
• The ability to understand an application's architecture and flow well enough to instrument it effectively and advise others doing the same
• Working knowledge of popular cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Infrastructure-as-Code tooling (Terraform, Kubernetes, Helm), and CI/CD platforms and practices (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc.)
• Previous experience in Software Development or System Operations, with a strong preference for candidates who have worked on distributed systems at scale
• Excellent written and verbal technical communication skills, with the ability to tailor depth and framing for both engineering teams and technical leadership
• Ability to take a loosely defined goal, scope it into a concrete deliverable, and ship it
• Comfort moving between long-horizon advisory work and short, focused delivery engagements
• Previous experience in Customer Success, Technical Account Management, Sales Engineering, or Consulting
• Deep understanding of Distributed Tracing concepts (Context Propagation, Sampling, Visualization, etc.)

On Target Earnings (OTE) based on level of experience (Base + Commission)

$155,000 - $210,000 USD

What you'll get when you join the Hive:

• A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
• It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
• Time to recharge with unlimited PTO
• A distributed-first mindset and culture (really!)
• Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
• Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
• Annual development allowance
• And much more...

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.

Diversity & Accommodations:

We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize that there is no single path to success and embrace nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.

We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our hiring process, please let your recruiter know.

As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work. If there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, we’re always open to feedback.

Privacy Notice:

If you apply for a job at Honeycomb and your application is unsuccessful (or you withdraw from the process or decline our offer), Honeycomb will retain your information after your application for a period of time in accordance with local laws. We retain this information for various reasons, including in case we face a legal challenge in respect of a recruitment decision, to consider you for other current or future jobs at Honeycomb, and to help us better understand, analyze and improve our recruitment processes.

If you do not want us to retain your information, or want us to update it, please [e-mail] . Please note, however, that we may retain some information if required by law or as necessary to protect ourselves from legal claims.

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