Lead Software Engineer - Java

New Relic is a global observability company that builds an intelligent platform for monitoring complex systems. The Lead Software Engineer will set technical direction for data-ingest systems within the Data Platform, lead architecture and delivery of distributed services, remain hands-on with production code, and mentor engineers. The role focuses on high-throughput systems built primarily with Java, Kafka, Kubernetes, and a cell-based architecture.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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