Staff Software Engineer / Tech Lead at Netboxlabs

STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER / TECH LEAD NetBox Labs is seeking a Staff Engineer or Tech Lead to join our engineering team in a technical leadership capacity. This is a high-impact individual contributor role for an engineer who excels at both building great software and elevating the teams around them. A Staff Engineer or Tech Lead at NetBox Labs should bring strong technical judgment and a collaborative mindset to shape how we design and evolve our systems. They write code, lead design discussions, mentor engineers, and bridge the gap between execution and long-term technical coherence, without losing sight of what needs to ship. This role is ideal for someone seeking to have a large impact on a critical product, who thrives in the intersection of hands-on engineering and cross-team influence, and who finds energy in helping other engineers do their best work. RESPONSIBILITIES - Drive technical direction across our Observability team, ensuring alignment between product goals, system design, and engineering execution. - Design, build, and maintain backend systems supporting NetBox Labs' SaaS and on-premise products, including open-source, source-available, and commercial offerings. - Guide how teams structure technical domains, define clear service boundaries, and evolve contracts and interfaces over time. - Collaborate with platform, product, and infrastructure teams to ensure backend systems integrate cohesively across authentication, authorization, billing, and data layers. - Mentor engineers across teams through code reviews, design sessions, and ongoing technical coaching; driving good outcomes within their domains, not just your own. - Operate what you build: participate in deployment, monitoring, and on-call rotations to ensure reliability. - Partner with product managers and engineering directors to translate roadmap goals into well-scoped engineering plans: breaking large initiatives into phases, surfacing risks early, and keeping technical and product timelines in sync. - Contribute to technical documentation, internal knowledge sharing, and raising the overall engineering bar. REQUIREMENTS - 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including time in a startup or high-growth environment. - Proven ability to decompose large, ambiguous projects into concrete plans with clear milestones, dependencies, and ownership. - Demonstrated success in a tech lead capacity, owning technical design for complex systems and clarifying dependencies on other engineering teams. - Proficiency in using AI-assisted development and software lifecycle tooling, and excited about the transition to AI native product development - Strong software architecture fundamentals: domain boundaries, modular design, decoupled interfaces, and an understanding of how these choices compound over time. - Experience deploying and operating services in Kubernetes in public clouds and on-prem infrastructure. - Proficiency in Go, with experience building reliable backend services and distributed systems. - Experience building or owning observability and telemetry systems: instrumentation, metrics pipelines, distributed tracing, and alerting at scale. - Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with a track record of working closely with Product Managers to align technical execution with roadmap priorities. - Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical ideas to engineers, product managers, and leadership alike. - A track record of mentoring and growing engineers: through thoughtful feedback, pairing, and leading by example. NICE TO HAVE - Deep familiarity with observability tooling and protocols: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Mimir/Loki/Grafana (or similar) and experience operating these systems in production at scale. - Experience with event-driven or streaming system architectures. - Experience building multi-tenant SaaS systems with security and compliance awareness (e.g., SOC 2). - Familiarity with networking devices and infrastructure, network automation, and standard network protocols. OUR CULTURE AND VALUES:  - We own and solve problems with high attention to detail. - Our open source contributors, users, customers & team are all part of our community. When our community wins, we win. - We prioritize simplicity and think twice before adding complexity - Clear communication helps keep our team aligned and collaborating smoothly. ABOUT NETBOX LABS: NetBox Labs helps companies build and manage complex networks. We help customers accelerate network automation by delivering open, composable products and supporting the network automation community. NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of open source NetBox, the world’s most popular network source of truth, and Orb, the next-generation open source network observability platform. Our products include NetBox Enterprise, a fully supported self-managed NetBox with advanced features, and NetBox Cloud, a secure, scalable, and reliable SaaS edition of NetBox. NetBox powers thousands of companies, and NetBox Labs is backed by investment from Notable Capital (formerly GGV), Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Flybridge, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, and Mango Capital.