[Remote] Senior Software Engineer - Observe by Snowflake, OpenTelemetry

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Snowflake is powering the era of the agentic enterprise and is seeking AI-native thinkers to reinvent how they work. As a Senior Software Engineer on the OpenTelemetry team, you'll drive Observe's open-source strategy and work on challenges in telemetry collection and instrumentation, collaborating with the OTel community to shape industry standards.ResponsibilitiesPioneer new instrumentation capabilities in the OpenTelemetry community, defining and building next-generation telemetry collection for emerging domains including LLM/AI inference, Browser RUM, and mobileDesign and implement OTel Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters) and SDK instrumentation libraries that strengthen Observe's position as a leading OTel destinationCollaborate with the OpenTelemetry open-source community by contributing code, participating in SIG discussions, authoring RFCs, and reviewing pull requests to ensure high-quality contributionsArchitect and own the Observe Agent — our OTel Collector distribution — including its extension points, pipeline architecture, and release strategyContribute to OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping define standardized telemetry schemas for new and evolving technology domainsWork with product and field engineering teams to translate customer instrumentation challenges into upstream contributions and product featuresRepresent Snowflake/Observe in the OTel community — present at conferences, build relationships with maintainers at other vendors, and drive consensus on specification decisionsSkills5+ years of software engineering experience with meaningful involvement in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem (Collector, SDKs, or instrumentation libraries)Strong programming skills in Go (OTel Collector) and familiarity with at least one SDK language (Java, Python, JS/TS, or .NET)Deep understanding of OTel's architecture: the Collector pipeline model, SDK internals, context propagation, and the semantic conventions specification processExperience contributing to open-source projects with multi-vendor governance — consensus-building, RFC authorship, and cross-organizational collaborationExperience building cloud-native services and working with public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCPA passion for open-source software and community engagement, particularly in the observability and telemetry ecosystemStrong opinions on instrumentation design: what makes telemetry useful vs. noisy, and how to balance coverage with performance overheadApprover or maintainer status in an OTel SIG (Collector, SDK, Semantic Conventions, or OpAMP)LLM/AI observability instrumentation — tracing inference chains, token usage, model performance metricsBrowser RUM or front-end performance instrumentationDesigning and shipping an OTel Collector distribution or Kubernetes operatorCompany OverviewSnowflake is a cloud data platform that provides a data warehouse as a service designed for the cloud. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in San Mateo, California, USA, with a workforce of 5001-10000 employees. Its website is https://www.snowflake.com.Company H1B SponsorshipSnowflake has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 76 in 2026, 428 in 2025, 281 in 2024, 154 in 2023, 182 in 2022, 113 in 2021, 98 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.