Senior Software Engineer II - LLM Observability

What We’re Building

Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!

If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these blog posts and Honeycomb.io press releases.

Who We Are

We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.

How We Work

We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1. #LI-Remote Little more about the team:

The team builds observability for AI in Honeycomb. We help customers see what their agents are doing, what those agents cost, and where errors happen. We also give them insight into individual conversations so they can debug them. We're bringing LLM and agent observability together, and we own both the data foundation and the product experiences built on top of it.

You'll work in a small, cross-functional group of engineers with a dedicated product manager and designer, shipping features customers use in production. If you want to define how people understand and debug AI systems, this is the team for you.

What you’ll do in the role

Own end-to-end development of AI observability capabilities, from ingestion to in-product visualizations.

Architect and evolve the data model and infrastructure that let us observe agents and their ecosystems across the Honeycomb product.

Build systems that analyze and surface AI-specific signals, such as cost, token usage, errors, and anomalies.

Collaborate with product and design partners to make sure what we build is usable, intuitive, and unlocks meaningful user workflows.

Teach best practices for exploring and understanding AI system behavior across conversations and workloads.

Iterate through fast feedback loops and experimentation, and share both wins and failures.

What you’ll bring to the role

Significant software engineering experience, with a record of shipping and owning features end to end.

Experience shipping customer-facing features at a SaaS company, beyond internal tooling.

Full-stack range, with proficiency in backend development (Go and/or Python) and frontend development (TypeScript and React).

A track record of working closely with product managers and designers.

Regular, hands-on use of AI tools in your day-to-day engineering work.

Experience being on call. You'd join our rotation after about 90 days.

A track record of navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving field where requirements shift and experimentation is a core part of the job.

Bonus: Experience building LLM or agent-powered features in production.

Bonus: Hands-on experience with observability tooling, such as OpenTelemetry.

Base Salary based on level of experience

$183,340—$206,000 USD

What you'll get when you join the Hive

A stake in our success

• generous equity with employee-friendly stock program It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are
• our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience Time to recharge with unlimited PTO A distributed-first mindset and culture (really!) Home office, co-working, and internet stipend Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood Annual development allowance And much more...

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.

Phishing and Recruitment Scam Warning

We take your security seriously. Please be aware that recruitment scams are increasingly common and scammers may create email addresses or websites to impersonate Honeycomb employees. To help protect you:

All communications will come from an @honeycomb.io email address We occasionally work with external recruiting agencies. These partners will use legitimate business email addresses—never personal accounts like Gmail or Yahoo.

Our recruiting process will never ask you to provide financial or sensitive personal information, including but not limited to:

Social security or tax identification numbers Credit card numbers Bank account information

Diversity & Accommodations

We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize that there is no single path to success and embrace nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.

We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our hiring process, please let your recruiter know.

As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work. If there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, we’re always open to feedback.