Lead Software Engineer - Java

Title: Lead Software Engineer - Java

Location: Portland, Oregon, USA

Job Description:

We are a global team of innovators and pioneers dedicated to shaping the future of observability. At New Relic, we build an intelligent platform that empowers companies to thrive in an AI-first world by giving them unparalleled insight into their complex systems. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we're looking for passionate people to join our mission. If you're ready to help the world's best companies optimize their digital applications, we invite you to explore a career with us!

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.
 

#LI-GK1 #LI-Remote

The pay range below represents a reasonable estimate of the salary for the listed position. This role is eligible for a corporate bonus plan. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related factors such as an applicant’s skills, qualifications, and experience.

New Relic provides a variety of benefits for this role, including healthcare, dental, vision, parental leave and planning, and mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, flex time-off, 11 paid holidays, volunteer time-off, and other competitive benefits designed to improve the lives of our employees.

Estimated Base Pay Range

$186,000 - $233,000 USD

Fostering a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment is important to us. We work hard to make everyone feel comfortable bringing their best, most authentic selves to work every day. We celebrate our talented Relics’ different backgrounds and abilities, and recognize the different paths they took to reach us – including nontraditional ones. Their experiences and perspectives inspire us to make our products and company the best they can be. We’re looking for people who feel connected to our mission and values, not just candidates who check off all the boxes. 

We believe in empowering all Relics to achieve professional and business success through a flexible workforce model. This model allows us to work in a variety of workplaces that best support our success, including fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid.

Our hiring process

In compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work and to complete employment eligibility verification. Note: Our stewardship of the data of thousands of customers means that a criminal background check is required to join New Relic.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records based on individual circumstances and in accordance with applicable law including, but not limited to, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. New Relic does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with New Relic.

New Relic develops and distributes encryption software and technology that complies with U.S. export controls and licensing requirements. Certain New Relic roles require candidates to pass an export compliance assessment as a condition of employment in any global location. If relevant, we will provide more information later in the application process.

Candidates are evaluated based on qualifications, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, age, disability, neurodiversity, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other legally protected characteristics.