Senior Engineering Manager - Storage Team

What We’re Building

Honeycomb is the observability platform for teams who manage software that matters. Send any data to our one-of-a-kind data store, solve problems with all the relevant context, and fix issues before your customers find them. Honeycomb is the unified, fast, and collaborative choice for engineering teams who care about customer experience to get the answers they need, quickly. We are passionate about consumer-quality developer tools and excited to build technology that raises our industry’s expectations of what our tools can do for us. 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, as 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 remote-first 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

A little more about the team

The Honeycomb product handles enormous amounts of data and the Storage team owns the systems (called “Retriever” internally) responsible for storing and querying those data. Curious how we do it? Interested in finding ways to improve systems at scale? Come help us build resilient architectures, obsess over query performance and optimization, collaborate with product teams to ensure our customers have access to their data in a highly performant way, and have fun on a highly skilled and engaging team. We’re looking for an engineering manager with experience building databases and delivering on tight latency expectations.

You can read more about what the team’s been up to on the Honeycomb blog, like how they virtualized data sets last year.

We are open to Manager and Senior Manager leveling for this role.

What you’ll do in the role:  

Healthy and Inclusive team builder

Build high-performing, sustainable team practices that enable us to deliver value incrementally while balancing trade-offs with scalable architectures.

Craft resilient teams that can keep going while key team members are on PTO. Actively identify potential knowledge silos or bottlenecks and ensure there’s a plan in place to mitigate the risk.

Prioritize building a respectful, high-achieving, inclusive culture on the team. This team includes many leaders, who all bring a different set of experiences and expertise to the table. You’ll use your skills to help them navigate hard conversations and set norms for the team to follow around conflict.

Strategic thinking that moves mountains

Frame projects and prioritization around impact to the business and value for the users.

Communicate your own team’s roadmap and strategy across the organization as well as understand how it intersects with your team’s partners

Courageous communicator and motivator

Ensure large hairy projects that cross domains, such as database upgrades, API changes, or re-architecture plans.

Lead by example and proactively foster psychological safety in your team and the wider organization.

Develop strong cross-functional relationships across the company

Take a blameless approach to management and organizational retrospectives to improve

Develops self and others

Mentor, coach, or sponsor more junior managers and engineers by sharing your favorite practices, allowing them to shadow your processes, and providing them with both positive and constructive feedback.

Get curious about feedback when receiving feedback and seek to understand when giving feedback. Work with those giving feedback to make sure it’s specific and actionable.

Don’t just retain high performers but help develop and grow more high performers.

Think like an owner

Look across the organization and identify holes in ownership and raise them. Identify when work is poorly distributed across teams and work with leadership to resolve the issue. 

Partner with your management peers to fill gaps and brainstorm creative solutions together that might be outside of the usual guidelines.

• Build high-performing, sustainable team practices that enable us to deliver value incrementally while balancing trade-offs with scalable architectures.
• Craft resilient teams that can keep going while key team members are on PTO. Actively identify potential knowledge silos or bottlenecks and ensure there’s a plan in place to mitigate the risk.Prioritize building a respectful, high-achieving, inclusive culture on the team. This team includes many leaders, who all bring a different set of experiences and expertise to the table. You’ll use your skills to help them navigate hard conversations and set norms for the team to follow around conflict.
• Frame projects and prioritization around impact to the business and value for the users.
• Communicate your own team’s roadmap and strategy across the organization as well as understand how it intersects with your team’s partners
• Ensure large hairy projects that cross domains, such as database upgrades, API changes, or re-architecture plans.
• Lead by example and proactively foster psychological safety in your team and the wider organization.
• Develop strong cross-functional relationships across the company
• Take a blameless approach to management and organizational retrospectives to improve
• Mentor, coach, or sponsor more junior managers and engineers by sharing your favorite practices, allowing them to shadow your processes, and providing them with both positive and constructive feedback.
• Get curious about feedback when receiving feedback and seek to understand when giving feedback. Work with those giving feedback to make sure it’s specific and actionable.
• Don’t just retain high performers but help develop and grow more high performers.
• Look across the organization and identify holes in ownership and raise them. Identify when work is poorly distributed across teams and work with leadership to resolve the issue. 
• Partner with your management peers to fill gaps and brainstorm creative solutions together that might be outside of the usual guidelines.

• You have some experience leading a high-performing team of engineers, including managing senior engineers, partnering across multiple business functions, and shipping multi-team projects. You default to supporting and growing empowered teams through a blend of psychological safety and positive accountability.
• You understand the value of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team and bring that lens to your work as a leader in hiring, team culture, and beyond. We are trying to raise the standards for developer tools, and we know that a diverse, inclusive, equitable team will help us build better products for a larger swath of the industry.
• You have experience working with storage systems, an ability to reason through trade-offs of cost, speed, and complexity, and can understand basic strategies for approaching diagnosing issues. You understand the importance of data integrity for different types of data and have exercised a data disaster recovery plan.
• You are comfortable with the pace and trade offs of a growth stage startup. You know how to take care of yourself and your team, get your work done without working around the clock, prioritize ruthlessly, be able to tolerate a little uncertainty and sometimes wear different hats.
• You understand the importance of tight feedback loops across the software development lifecycle. You’re curious about how to improve your tools for internal users and to reduce toil for your own team. 
• You have a proven track record of working with highly technical product managers and can share experiences of where you’ve had to do some of the product discovery and feedback work yourself.

• Base pay (range) of $195,000 - $210,000 USD, CAD $256,716 - CAD $288,446 (Manager); $215,000 to $235,000 USD, CAD $295,313 - CAD $322,784 (Senior Manager)
• A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
• It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
• Time to Recharge - In addition to our Unlimited PTO policy, we have a company wide break at the end of the year
• A remote-first mindset and culture (really!)
• Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
• 100% employee/75% for dependents coverage for all benefits
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
• Annual development allowance
• And much more...

Please note we cannot currently sponsor or do visa transfers at this time.

Diversity & Accommodations:

We're building a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other, and welcome nontraditional candidates, and people of all backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. You don't need to be a millennial to join us, all gens are welcome! Further, we (of course) follow federal and state disability laws and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations during the application phase, interview process, and employment. Please email Talent@honeycomb.io to discuss accessible formats or accommodations. As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work; if we can do better - we want to know!