Software Engineer (Observability)

See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as our next Software Engineer on Twilio’s platform engineering observability team.

About the job

This position is needed to help our platform engineering observability team. Twilio is undergoing a large-scale observability transformation—and you can help shape the foundation. Observability is a strategic pillar and a key enabler for faster incident response, deeper customer-centric insights, and more cost-effective platform operations.

As a Software Engineer on the Platform Observability team, you’ll play a critical role in re-architecting how telemetry flows and is utilized through Twilio—making it structured, accessible, affordable, and actionable. Over the next 3 years, Twilio is rebuilding nearly every component of our observability platform, from data collection to real-time analytics. You will drive core initiatives that shift Twilio from fragmented tooling and wasteful data sprawl to a unified, OpenTelemetry-first observability stack built for scale.

You’ll lead technically and strategically—designing platform components, influencing org-wide architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and engaging directly with teams across Platform Engineering and R&D

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll:

• Lead the end-to-end architecture and delivery of key observability platform components, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and usability.
• Drive consistency and quality across all observability signals—logs, metrics, traces, and continuous profiling—building intuitive workflows for engineers.
• Serve as a technical advisor and mentor across the platform org, guiding design decisions and aligning cross-team efforts with long-term architectural goals.
• Go deep in one or more problem areas (e.g., high-cardinality telemetry, distributed tracing correlation, compute cost insights), while ensuring the platform scales horizontally.
• Collaborate with product teams, SREs, and developer experience groups to deeply understand telemetry needs and integrate observability into core engineering workflows.
• Design and build developer-friendly tooling and APIs to support incident response, performance analysis, and platform debugging at scale.
• Leverage (and optionally contribute to) open-source standards like OpenTelemetry to ensure interoperability and extensibility.
• Champion a pragmatic approach to observability—balancing performance, cost, and user value across diverse engineering teams.

*Required:

• Proven expertise in building and scaling observability systems (e.g., logging platforms, metrics pipelines, tracing infrastructure, or profiling tools).
• Lead technical execution for major components of Twilio’s observability overhaul, including our shift to centralized S3-based data lakes, OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and ClickHouse-backed query engines.
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (e.g., Go, Python, Java).
• Familiarity with high-cardinality data challenges and telemetry correlation techniques.
• Experience designing high-scale telemetry systems (e.g., Prometheus, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, Kafka, or equivalent).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and the challenges of observability in complex, microservice-based environments.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Provide architectural guidance and thought leadership across teams, helping to establish clear telemetry standards, efficient usage patterns, and scalable platform abstractions.
• Ability to make forward-looking technical decisions and lead others through ambiguity and chan

Desired:

• Familiarity with ClickHouse, Grafana Mimir, Athena, or equivalent systems for log and metrics querying.
• Contributions to open-source observability tools or communities.
• Experience building cost visibility or FinOps tooling for cloud compute and telemetry pipelines.

Location

This role will be remote from Ireland.