Senior Software Engineer, Issue Detection
Sentry · San Francisco, California ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Category
- Software engineering
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Salary
- USD 155,000 – 400,000 / year
Sentry · San Francisco, California ·
Senior engineer on Sentry's Issue Detection team designs, builds, and operates real-time distributed pipelines that process billions of events daily, deciding which events become developer-facing issues. Backend-heavy full-stack work in Python and TypeScript with data stores like PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and Kafka.
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.
Sentry's issue platform processes billions of events every day to help millions of developers find and fix bugs. The hard part is deciding which events point to a problem, which belong together, and what a developer needs to know to investigate.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Issue Detection team, you'll design, build, and operate the systems that make those decisions. You'll work on real-time processing pipelines, monitors, and analysis systems that detect problems and turn them into issues. The work combines distributed systems with product engineering. Choices about detection accuracy and processing latency affect which problems developers see and how soon they can act.
You'll help shape how developers monitor their applications and how Sentry groups related events into issues. You'll also build the context developers and AI agents need to investigate what went wrong. Keeping these systems reliable and fast as Sentry grows is part of the job, alongside making the issues they produce more useful.
Build and scale features on a product surface handling billions of events daily, where both query latency and correctness are immediately visible to users.
Own the design and delivery of substantial projects end to end, scoping alongside product and design, making the technical calls within your scope, shipping, and instrumenting what you ship so the team can measure it.
You will contribute to meaningful technical product decisions: grouping quality, search performance, migrations and backfills against enormous datasets, and making the surface work well for both humans and agents.
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. You instrument everything so the team can measure and improve.
Mentor and elevate others. You've helped engineers grow their skills. You celebrate wins and learn from failures alongside your teammates.
Are a distributed systems engineer who understands the realities of high-scale architectures. You know about eventual consistency, partitioning strategies, caching layers, and query optimization. You've debugged enough systems at scale that you now know to design for failure and build systems that degrade gracefully.
Are product-minded and understand that great engineering serves users. You collaborate effectively with Product and Design, offering technical perspectives that shape better products. You can explain technical constraints in user-centric terms. You get excited about making developers' lives better, not just solving technical puzzles.
Have strong full-stack instincts. While this role is backend-heavy, you understand the entire system from data ingestion to what renders in the browser. You know enough about frontend performance, API design, and user experience to make good architectural decisions that consider the whole picture.
Include and uplift others. You've helped engineers grow their skills in systems design, coding practices, and product thinking. You're generous with knowledge and patient in explaining complex concepts. You celebrate wins and learn from failures alongside your teammates.
5+ years of full-stack software engineering experience, ideally Python and TypeScript
Strong domain modeling skills, with working experience in distributed systems, data stores, and message queues
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Experience with PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, or Kafka is preferred
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.
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