engineering
Posted May 8Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry
at Snowflake
On-site
Responsibilities
- - 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.
- - Collaborate with core OTel maintainers and some of the brightest minds in the telemetry ecosystem, with the backing and scale of one of the world's leading data platforms.
Requirements
- To usher in this new era, we seek AI-native thinkers across every function who are energized by the opportunity to reinvent how they work.
- You don’t just use tools; you possess an innate curiosity, treating AI as a high-trust collaborator that is core to how you solve problems and accelerate your impact.
- Observe by Snowflake is an AI-powered observability platform built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud and engineered for scale.
- We ingest and store logs, metrics, traces, and events on an open, scalable data lakehouse using Apache Iceberg — at dramatically lower cost.
- As a Senior Software Engineer on the OpenTelemetry team, you'll play a key role in driving Observe's open-source strategy within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.
- You'll work on some of the most exciting challenges in telemetry collection and instrumentation — expanding coverage into emerging domains like LLM/AI observability and Browser RUM — while collaborating closely with the OTel community to shape the standards that the industry builds on.
- YOU WILL: - 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.
- 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 WITH: - Approver or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP). - LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metrics. - Browser RUM or front-end performance instrumentation. - Designing and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operator.
- WHY JOIN THE OPENTELEMETRY TEAM AT SNOWFLAKE?
- - Work on high-impact instrumentation challenges in emerging domains (LLM/AI, Browser RUM) where conventions don't yet exist and your contributions define the path forward.
- Snowflake employees must abide by the company’s data security plan as an essential part of their duties.
- Snowflake is growing fast, and we’re scaling our team to help enable and accelerate our growth.
Experience
- OUR IDEAL SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER WILL HAVE: - 5+ years of software engineering
Benefits
- 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. BONUS POINTS FOR
- How do you want to make your impact? For jobs located in the United States, please visit the job posting on the Snowflake Careers Site for salary and
Contact
- benefits information: careers.snowflake.com http://careers.snowflake.com
Additional details
- At Snowflake, we are powering the era of the agentic enterprise.
- We look for low-ego individuals who thrive in dynamic and fast-moving environments and move with an experimental mindset — who rapidly test emerging capabilities to discover simpler, more powerful ways to deliver results.
- OpenTelemetry is the foundation of how customers send data to Observe, and we are making significant investment in upstream OTel contributions to ensure Observe is the best destination for OTel-instrumented environments.
- - 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.
- - Be part of Snowflake's strategic investment in open-source observability — shaping the standards the entire industry builds on.
- - Have a direct feedback loop between your upstream contributions and enterprise customers processing petabytes of OTel data daily through Observe.
- It is every employee’s duty to keep customer information secure and confidential.
- We are looking for people who share our values, challenge ordinary thinking, and push the pace of innovation while building a future for themselves and Snowflake.