Staff Software Engineer - Issues

About Sentry

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.

Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

About the role

Issues are the core of Sentry where it turns billions of events a day into actionable problems for developers to resolve. For most of its history, that has meant a long list of individual problems to work through, but that's changing. Sentry should tell you what's happening: that something broke ten minutes ago, what changed, who's affected and what's already being done about it. Seer works out the root cause and drafts a fix or hands it to a coding agent, and a person steps in only when needed.

That only works if the platform underneath can be trusted. It has to see the incident, not just the individual symptoms. It needs a complete record of what happened and who, or what, did it. And every query a human or an agent asks has to come back fast.

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Issues team, you'll set technical direction for the core system that makes this work. This space is moving fast and we expect what we ship to dramatically evolve as agents take on more of the work.

In this role you will

• Set technical direction for the Issue Platform. Own how issues are stored and queried, and lead how that evolves over the next several quarters.

• Move Sentry from a list of problems to a picture of what's happening. Recognize when dozens of errors, alerts and detected problems are one incident, group them by root cause, and surface what matters without adding noise.

• Make everything that happens to an issue queryable. Every issue builds up a history of events and of what people and agents have done with it. Make that history fast to search, filter and build on, for people in the UI and agents over the API, across PostgreSQL, ClickHouse and the Kafka pipelines that feed them.

• Lead across teams and grow the engineers around you. Work closely with our Ingest, AI/ML and Issues teams, and help the engineers around you take on larger, more ambiguous problems.

You’ll love this job if you

• Are comfortable when the ground keeps moving. How developers handle production problems is changing every few months. You'd rather build a system for what's coming than tune the old one forever.

• Want your systems to have a new kind of user. People and agents, including Seer, MCP clients and third-party tools, now act on the same issues. The system you build determines how effective they can be without a human.

• Champion product quality and user experience. Build features that don't just work, they delight. You understand that milliseconds matter in the developer experience. You sweat the details of interfaces, error messages, loading states, and edge cases.

• Want to use what you build. We debug Sentry with Sentry every day. You'll be responsible for what you ship, and you'll use that experience to shape what we build next.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering, much of it on large-scale backend systems in Python

• You've set technical direction for a high-scale distributed system and led it across teams, from design doc to rollout

• You've built or scaled a search or query system over large, fast-changing data

• You've replaced a system you designed once the problem changed, and brought the team with you

• You’re comfortable moving quickly and iterating toward an ideal solution

• You're product-minded, with enough full-stack range to design from ingestion to the browser

• You communicate clearly in writing and in person

Equal Opportunity at Sentry

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected].

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