Senior Software Engineer, Issue Detection

Sentry; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Commuter Stipend

Professional Development Stipend

Charitable Matching Program

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Sentry is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the Issue Detection team in San Francisco to design, build, and operate real-time decision systems that group billions of events into issues and guide developers during investigations.

You will own end-to-end projects, optimize detection accuracy and latency, and collaborate with Product and Design to deliver high-quality experiences. You will also mentor teammates while shaping the product’s future.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-stack software engineering experience, ideally Python and TypeScript.
• Strong domain modeling skills, with working experience in distributed systems, data stores, and message queues.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or Kafka is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale features on a product surface handling billions of events daily, where query latency and correctness are visible to users.
• Own the design and delivery of substantial projects end to end, scoping with product and design, making technical calls, shipping, and instrumenting.
• Contribute to meaningful technical product decisions: grouping quality, search performance, migrations, and backfills against large datasets.
• Champion product quality and user experience: ensure interfaces, error messages, loading states, and edge cases are well designed and measurable.
• Mentor and elevate others, helping engineers grow their skills in systems design, coding practices, and product thinking.

Skills

Full-stack

Distributed systems

Python

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

ClickHouse

Kafka

Tools

PostgreSQL

ClickHouse

Kafka

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Issue Detection

About Sentry

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.

Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

About the role

Sentry's issue platform processes billions of events every day to help millions of developers find and fix bugs. The hard part is deciding which events point to a problem, which belong together, and what a developer needs to know to investigate.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Issue Detection team, you'll design, build, and operate the systems that make those decisions. You'll work on real-time processing pipelines, monitors, and analysis systems that detect problems and turn them into issues. The work combines distributed systems with product engineering. Choices about detection accuracy and processing latency affect which problems developers see and how soon they can act.

You’ll help shape how developers monitor their applications and how Sentry groups related events into issues. You’ll also build the context developers and AI agents need to investigate what went wrong. Keeping these systems reliable and fast as Sentry grows is part of the job, alongside making the issues they produce more useful.

In this role you will

Build and scale features on a product surface handling billions of events daily, where both query latency and correctness are immediately visible to users.

Own the design and delivery of substantial projects end to end, scoping alongside product and design, making the technical calls within your scope, shipping, and instrumenting what you ship so the team can measure it.

You will contribute to meaningful technical product decisions: grouping quality, search performance, migrations and backfills against enormous datasets, and making the surface work well for both humans and agents.

Champion product quality and user experience. Build features that don't just work—they delight. You understand that milliseconds matter in the developer experience. You sweat the details of interfaces, error messages, loading states, and edge cases. You instrument everything so the team can measure and improve.

Mentor and elevate others. You've helped engineers grow their skills. You celebrate wins and learn from failures alongside your teammates.

You’ll love this job if you

Are a distributed systems engineer who understands the realities of high-scale architectures. You know about eventual consistency, partitioning strategies, caching layers, and query optimization. You've debugged enough systems at scale that you now know to design for failure and build systems that degrade gracefully.

Are product-minded and understand that great engineering serves users. You collaborate effectively with Product and Design, offering technical perspectives that shape better products. You can explain technical constraints in user‑centric terms. You get excited about making developers' lives better, not just solving technical puzzles.

Include and uplift others. You've helped engineers grow their skills in systems design, coding practices, and product thinking. You're generous with knowledge and patient in explaining complex concepts. You celebrate wins and learn from failures alongside your teammates.

Qualifications

5+ years of full-stack software engineering experience, ideally Python and TypeScript

Strong domain modeling skills, with working experience in distributed systems, data stores, and message queues

Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Experience with PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or Kafka is preferred

Equal Opportunity at Sentry

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally‑protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to perform the essential functions of their jobs, or seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open‑source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible.

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Commuter Stipend

You shouldn't have to pay to get to work.

Professional Development Stipend

Keep your skills sharp. You'll need them.

Stay healthy, stay happy, do
yoga or something.

Charitable Matching Program

You're a good person. We like that.

Flexible PTO

You work, we pay. You take time off,
we still pay.