Senior Software Engineer, Streaming Platform

Sentry; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 155,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

Sentry is building the Streaming Platform to power our ingestion pipelines and real-time data processing. You will design, build, and operate components including Kafka, the runtime, and developer-facing APIs to simplify deployment and running streaming applications at scale.

You will tackle challenges in distributed systems, real-time data processing, and developer experience, aiming for reliability, low latency, and reduced operational overhead across billions of events.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience with distributed systems or real-time streaming.
• Proficiency in Python or Rust; experience in Go or Java is valuable.
• Experience with Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming or similar tools.
• Cloud experience with Kubernetes, AWS or GCP; strong delivery guarantees.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate components of the Streaming Platform, including Kafka and the streaming runtime.
• Implement high-throughput stream processing with strong correctness guarantees.
• Build automation and a control plane for fleet management and observability.
• Collaborate with product engineers to enable fast, reliable ingestion pipelines.
• Improve observability and failover for mission-critical real-time systems.

Skills

Python

Rust

Go

Java

Distributed systems

Real-time streaming

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Spark Streaming

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

ClickHouse

Arrow

Job description

About SentrySoftware 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

The Streaming Platform team at Sentry is building the next generation of infrastructure that powers our ingestion pipelines and real-time data processing systems. Our platform ingests, processes, and distributes hundreds of thousands of events per second with low latency and high reliability. We are creating a system that makes it easy for Sentry engineers to deploy and run Streaming Applications at scale by simplifying the complexity of Kafka, scaling consumers automatically, and managing state so product teams can focus on building great experiences for developers.

As part of this team, you will work on challenges at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time data processing, and developer experience. You will help us create a self-service streaming platform that improves stability, accelerates time to production, and reduces operational overhead.

In this role you willDesign, build, and operate components of our Streaming Platform, including Kafka, the streaming runtime, high-level APIs, and developer-facing abstractions.Implement resilient, high-throughput stream processing systems that handle unbounded datasets with strong correctness guarantees (delivery, checkpointing, watermarking, and more).Build scalable automation and control plane for Kafka fleet management and improve efficiency.Partner with product engineers to ensure our abstractions enable fast, reliable, and consistent ingestion pipelines.Improve observability, monitoring, and failover for mission-critical real-time systems.

You’ll love this job if youYou enjoy working on distributed systems at scale and care about reliability and performance.You like building abstractions that make complex infrastructure easier for others to use.You are motivated by designing systems that balance flexibility for developers with best practices for stability.You are excited to shape how Sentry handles near real-time ingestion and analytics at scale.You value being part of a collaborative team where your contributions make a broad impact across the company.

Qualifications

5+ years of software engineering experience, with background in distributed systems, data infrastructure, or real-time streaming.Proficiency in a programming language such as Python, Rust, Go, or Java (we primarily use Python and Rust, but experience in similar languages is valuable).Experience with streaming technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Spark Streaming, or similar tools.Strong understanding of partitioning, watermarks, windowing, stateful/stateless processing, and delivery guarantees.Experience building and operating systems in cloud environments such as Kubernetes, AWS, or GCP.Nice to have: experience with ClickHouse, Arrow or other columnar data processing, or modern streaming SQL engines such as Materialize or RisingWave.

The base salary range that Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $155,000 to $400,000 USD plus up to 20% bonus. A successful candidate’s actual base salary amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See Sentry Benefits for more details about the Company’s benefit plans/programs.

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 (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) 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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