About this role

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 Field Reliability Engineer (FRE) is an extension of Honeycomb’s extensive brand and technical expertise focused on our customer base via engagements, support and our managed services. In this role you parachute into the most complex, highest-stakes technical situations our customers face - unblocking them when they’re stuck, creating tooling, guiding our Solution Architecture team through complex decisions, and ensuring prospects and customers get the most out of Honeycomb and the broader observability ecosystem.

You’re equal parts platform engineer and customer engineer. You build and operate the managed infrastructure our largest customers depend on, and you’re the technical backstop the SA team calls when a deal gets deep into infrastructure, data pipelines, or production debugging. This isn’t a support role - it’s a technical leadership role where you solve problems that don’t have runbooks yet, build the platforms and tooling so the next person can have a runbook, and directly impact revenue by unblocking our most strategic deals.

What You’ll Do Platform Engineering — Architecture & Standards Ownership Define the architecture and operational standards for Refinery as a Service (RaaS) and Honeycomb Private Cloud (HnyPC) — decisions other engineers build within — across multiple AWS accounts and regions. Architect the Terraform modules, Helm charts, and deployment automation that other FREs build on and extend, not just consume. Set the technical direction for how Honeycomb instruments, monitors, and operates its own managed infrastructure — using Honeycomb to monitor Honeycomb.

Own capacity planning, scaling strategy, upgrade sequencing, and cost optimization across multi-region AWS environments. Build platforms and automation that change how the FRE team operates at scale — enabling the team to grow without proportional headcount. Technical Escalation & Unblocking Serve as the final technical escalation point for the most novel, highest-stakes customer situations — problems with no precedent in existing runbooks.

Resolve deep infrastructure and observability issues spanning distributed systems, Kubernetes clusters, AWS networking (ALBs, PrivateLink, NLBs, VPCs), and polyglot service meshes, often in real time under revenue-critical pressure. Partner directly with customer SRE, platform, and engineering leadership to navigate multi-week escalations and architecture redesigns tied to the company's largest relationships. Provide senior incident command for managed services (RaaS, HnyPC) — the point of last escalation when Tier 2 support and IC3/IC4 engineers need staff-level judgment.

Build the playbooks, diagnostic frameworks, and tooling that let IC3/IC4 engineers operate independently in situations that previously required staff involvement. Open Source & Ecosystem Leadership Shape Honeycomb's open source strategy in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem — drive initiatives, not just contributions. Represent Honeycomb at the community level in OpenTelemetry SIGs, setting direction on collectors, exporters, and instrumentation libraries the broader ecosystem depends on.

Spot whitespace in the OTel ecosystem that creates structural customer friction, and lead the effort to close it — upstream or through Honeycomb tooling. Build reference architectures and integration guides that set the standard for effective instrumentation across common customer environments (Kubernetes, ECS, serverless). Lead feature and architecture contributions to Honeycomb's own open source projects (Refinery, Honeycomb Collector Distro) that support managed service capabilities at scale.

Technical Backstop for the Field Be the final technical authority Solutions Architects call when a deal goes deeper than any existing playbook — join live production troubleshooting, validate architecture decisions, and provide the infrastructure credibility that closes the company's most technically demanding evaluations. Own the infrastructure and data pipeline narrative on the company's most strategic accounts, in partnership with SA leadership.

Lead architecture reviews, SLO workshops, and instrumentation deep-dives for the most complex customer environments (multi-cluster Kubernetes, hybrid cloud, high-cardinality workloads) — often advising customer VPs and C-suite directly. Step into the highest-stakes customer-facing POCs and pilots as technical lead, standing up collector pools, configuring Refinery pipelines, and proving out integrations in the customer's actual environment.

Drive prioritization at the roadmap level by identifying strategic gaps between Honeycomb's product capabilities and what the company's largest customers need. Internal Tooling, Mentorship

Source listing: greenhouse_honeycomb