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New Relic is hiring a Lead Software Engineer to join the Data Platform team, responsible for the ingest pipeline into NRDB—New Relic's purpose-built telemetry datastore that ingests, stores, and retrieves metrics, events, logs, and traces at massive scale. This role sits at the critical path for every signal reaching a New Relic customer.
As a Lead, you will set technical direction for the team by owning architecture and design decisions, weighing hard tradeoffs, and leading engineers through 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 perspective across New Relic by contributing to standards and shared resources.
The team operates a fleet of Kubernetes-managed services built primarily in Java, with Kafka as the backbone for inter-service communication and a cell-based architecture. You'll work on systems processing millions of messages per second and handling petabytes of data.
Key responsibilities include: weighing tradeoffs between performance, maintainability, and operational cost in architecture decisions; scoping, estimating, and owning delivery of complex multi-engineer projects from design to GA; evaluating and introducing new tools, patterns, and technologies (including LLM-assisted development); staying hands-on by writing and shipping production code regularly; developing engineers through code review and mentorship; communicating technical risk to stakeholders; owning operational health including CI/CD, observability, and incident response; and identifying and closing gaps in tools, documentation, or team coverage.
Required: 7–10 years of professional software engineering experience with 2+ years leading or acting as technical lead; deep fluency in Java or comparable OOP language; experience running stateful distributed services in production under unpredictable load; experience leading architecture and design reviews; hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD tooling (Argo CD or similar), event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar), and container orchestration (Kubernetes); experience with data modeling and query optimization against relational databases at scale; track record of mentoring engineers; strong written and verbal communication.
Bonus: Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, CloudFormation); experience with time-series or telemetry data (NRQL, PromQL); formal SRE practices; secure-by-default design experience; open source contributions.
