Snowflake

Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry

US-CA-Menlo Park. Posted 6 months ago

The role

You will drive the open-source strategy for Observe by Snowflake within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem. You will design OTel Collector components, architect the Observe Agent, and contribute to OpenTelemetry standards and community discussions.

What you will do

  • Pioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community.
  • Design and implement OTel Collector components and SDK instrumentation libraries.
  • Collaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community through code, SIG discussions, RFCs, and pull requests.
  • Architect and own the Observe Agent including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategy.
  • Contribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions.
  • Work with product and field engineering teams to translate customer challenges into upstream contributions.
  • Represent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community by presenting at conferences and building relationships with maintainers.

Required qualifications

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries).
  • Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Strong opinions on instrumentation design.

Nice to have

  • 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.

About the company

Snowflake is powering the era of the agentic enterprise. Observe by Snowflake is an AI-powered observability platform built on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.