Backed by Insight.
About the role
As a Principal Software Engineer (Observability & Telemetry Data) , you will set the technical direction for how Smartsheet collects, models, stores, and derives value from telemetry data. This is an architect role: you will define the telemetry data platform and the standards that govern it, carry that architecture across engineering org boundaries, partner with our Data and AI Platform teams on Databricks and MLflow integration, and act as the company's definitive technical voice on observability.
What they're looking for
- 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, data platforms, or observability infrastructure, including time at Principal or Staff level
- Databricks Depth: Practical experience with the Databricks platform (jobs, clusters, Unity Catalog, Delta) and with MLflow for model and agent telemetry
- OpenTelemetry Depth: Practical experience with OTel collectors, semantic conventions, context propagation, and sampling strategy, including tail-based sampling
- Pipeline Engineering: Experience with high-volume log and telemetry pipelines, including FluentBit or Fluentd, streaming transport such as Kinesis or Kafka, and search backend index and mapping design
- Advanced AWS & Kubernetes Expertise: EKS, ECS Fargate, EC2, Lambda, and CloudWatch in production
- 10+ years of programming experience with modern languages such as Go, Java, Python, or Scala, and strong SQL
More about this role
For over 20 years, Smartsheet has empowered teams to manage work seamlessly and scale solutions smarter. Now, in our most ambitious chapter yet, we are uniting human teams with AI agents. By orchestrating the work agents do best, automating manual tasks and uncovering insights at scale, we create the space for people to focus on what truly matters: judgment, creativity, and big thinking. That is magic at work, and it’s what we show up for every day.
Observability Engineering owns the breadth and depth of observability and telemetry at Smartsheet. We build and operate the shared platform every engineering team depends on to understand how their software behaves in production (metrics, logs, distributed traces, RUM, synthetics, and AI/agentic telemetry) across a global, multi-region, commercial and government footprint. We are consolidating ownership of all of it into a single correlated platform, and treating telemetry as what it actually is: one of the largest and most valuable datasets at the company. It's a broad mandate with real scope to shape, and we hold this internal platform to the same rigor, reliability, and product standards as customer-facing software.
As a Principal...
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