Lead Software Engineer - Java

Your opportunity

We're hiring a Lead Software Engineer for our team within New Relic's Data Platform, responsible for managing ingest into NRDB—New Relic's purpose-built telemetry datastore that ingests, stores, and retrieves metrics, events, logs, and traces at massive scale. Our team sits at the front of that pipeline, putting our work directly in the critical path for every signal that reaches a New Relic customer.

As a Lead, you'll set technical direction for the team: owning architecture and design decisions, weighing the hard tradeoffs, and leading a team of engineers through resolving complex problems in high-throughput distributed systems. You'll coach and grow the engineers around you, work closely with product and partner teams to translate roadmap priorities into technical plans, and represent the team's technical point of view beyond it by contributing to standards and shared resources used throughout New Relic.

We operate a fleet of Kubernetes-managed services built primarily in Java, with Kafka as the backbone for inter-service communication and a cell-based architecture. In doing so, our team solves engineering challenges and works with data at a scale rarely matched in the industry. If the idea of working on complex systems that process millions of messages per second and handle petabytes of data excites you, then you may be an excellent fit!

What you'll do

• Weigh tradeoffs between performance, maintainability, and operational cost when making architecture calls for our ingest systems
• Scope, estimate, and own delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects from design to GA
• Evaluate and introduce new tools, patterns, and technologies for the team — including LLM-assisted development practices where they are a logical fit
• Stay hands-on — write and ship production code regularly alongside the team you lead
• Develop engineers through code review, technical feedback, and career mentorship
• Communicate technical risk and tradeoffs in terms stakeholders can act on
• Own the operational health of the systems you lead — CI/CD, observability, and incident response
• Spot gaps in our tools, documentation, or team coverage — and make sure they get closed

This role requires

• 7–10 years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading or acting as a technical lead for a team or major initiative
• Deep fluency in Java or a comparable OOP language, with the ability to ramp quickly across other languages and frameworks the team uses
• Experience running stateful distributed services in production under unpredictable load, including debugging complex failure states and captaining incident remediation efforts
• Experience leading architecture and design reviews for complex systems
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD tooling (Argo CD or similar), event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar) and container orchestration (Kubernetes or similar)
• Experience with data modeling and query optimization against relational databases at scale
• A track record of mentoring engineers and giving feedback that improves a team's output, not just your own
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to make a technical case to non-technical stakeholders

Bonus points if you have

• Infrastructure-as-code experience across multiple environments and cloud providers (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
• Experience querying or reasoning about time-series or telemetry data (e.g., NRQL, PromQL, or similar)
• Experience with formal SRE practices — Managing SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning, or chaos/failure testing at scale
• Secure-by-default design experience (OWASP familiarity, secure coding practices, tools like Snyk/SonarQube)
• Contributions to open source projects

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

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