Principal Software Engineer - Observability & Telemetry Data

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 peopl...

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 ...

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 ...

10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, data platforms, or observability infrastructure, including time at Principal or Staff level. 
Deep Observability Expertise: Hands-on production ownership of metrics, logs, and distributed tracing at scale, including at least one major backend (Datadog, or comparable) and a working understanding of cardinality and cost mechanics. 
Telemetry Data Engineering: Demonstrated depth in large-scale data architecture, including open table formats (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg), Spark or comparable distributed processing, streaming ingestion, partitioning and schema evolution, and query performance and cost tuning over very large datasets. 
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. 
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, and GitOps workflows such as Flux or ArgoCD. 
Architectural Influence at Scale: A track record of setting technical direction that multiple teams and organizations adopted, including the written artifacts (architecture decisions, standards, RFCs) that made it durable after you moved on. 
Strong incident response instincts, with experience improving mean-time-to-resolution through better instrumentation and better data rather than more heroics. 
A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical industry experience.
Legally eligible to work in the U.S. on an ongoing basis 
Experience instrumenting LLM or agentic systems, including OTel GenAI semantic conventions and tracing agent tool-call workflows. 
Data reliability engineering practice: freshness, quality, and lineage SLOs for production data pipelines
Telemetry cost engineering or FinOps at scale. 
Experience in regulated environments (FedRAMP, GovCloud) and designing telemetry that remains useful under redaction. 
Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager. 
Snowflake, or experience operating across more than one lakehouse or warehouse platform. 
Service catalog or internal developer platform work (Backstage or similar). 
Current US Perks & Benefits:
Employer subsidized medical/vision and dental coverage for full-time employees
401k Match to help you save for your future (50% of your contribution up to the first 6% of your eligible pay)
Monthly stipend to support your work and productivity
Flexible Time Away Program, plus Sick Time Off
US employees are automatically covered under Smartsheet-sponsored life insurance, short-term, and long-term disability plans
US employees receive 12 paid holidays per year
Up to 24 weeks of Parental Leave
Personal paid Volunteer Day to support our community
Opportunities for professional growth and development including access to Udemy online courses
Company Funded Perks, including a counseling membership, local retail discounts, and your own personal Smartsheet account
Teleworking options from any registered location in the U.S. (role specific)
Smartsheet provides a competitive base salary range for roles that may be hired in different geographic areas we are licensed to operate our business from. Actual compensation is determined by several factors including, but not limited to, level of professional, educational experience, skills, and specific candidate location. In addition, this role will be eligible for a market competitive incentive opportunity.
US Base Salary Pay Range
$222,500—$257,500 USD
 
Get to Know Us:
At Smartsheet, your ideas are heard, your potential is supported, and your contributions have real impact. You’ll have the freedom to explore, push boundaries, and grow beyond your role. We welcome diverse perspectives and nontraditional paths—because we know that impact comes from individuals who care deeply and challenge thoughtfully. When you’re doing work that stretches you, excites you, and connects you to something bigger, that’s magic at work. Let’s build what’s next, together.