Backend Software Engineer, Observability Product (Telemetry)

Department: Engineering

Location: US East Coast Remote, UK Remote

Compensation: $135K – $195K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus • Multiple Ranges

Employment Type: FullTime

NetBox Labs is seeking a Backend Engineer to join our rapidly expanding engineering team. We have multiple openings at different seniority levels across several teams.

A Backend Engineer at NetBox Labs builds the core systems and services that power our products—designing reliable APIs, data models, and distributed systems that scale. They focus on creating robust, maintainable software with clean abstractions and strong boundaries, enabling other teams to move quickly and confidently. While their primary expertise is backend development, they understand how their work connects to the broader product experience, collaborating closely with platform and product teams to deliver cohesive, end-to-end solutions.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, enjoys solving complex systems problems, and takes pride in building elegant, resilient software that forms the backbone of modern network and infrastructure automation.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems supporting NetBox Labs’ SaaS and on-premise products, including open-source, source-available, and commercial offerings.

• Integrate deeply with NetBox’s data model to drive network automation workflows.

• Define and evolve APIs and data schemas shared across products and teams, ensuring consistency and scalability.

• Maintain and extend backend services that power the user interface and customer-facing experiences.

• Design performant and reliable distributed systems, ensuring correctness and data integrity across components.

• Collaborate with platform engineers to integrate with authentication, authorization, licensing, and billing services.

• Contribute to observability and monitoring across services, ensuring visibility through metrics, logs, and traces.

• Profile and optimize database queries, API performance, and service-to-service communication.

• Participate in system design reviews, RFC discussions, and architecture working groups to ensure alignment across teams.

• Implement automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and code quality standards for backend services.

• Operate what you build—participate in deployment, monitoring, and on-call rotations to ensure reliability.

• Work with Product and UX teams to design intuitive user workflows and data visualizations.

• Contribute to technical documentation, specifications, and internal knowledge sharing.

• Mentor other engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and architectural discussions.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a startup environment.

• Proficiency in Golang and Python, with hands-on experience building distributed systems and backend microservices.

• Strong understanding of gRPC, protobuf, event-driven architecture, and streaming data systems.

• Experience with Redis Streams, Kafka, MQTT, AMQP, or similar messaging systems.

• Familiarity with observability concepts (metrics, logs, traces) and protocols such as OpenTelemetry.

• Solid grasp of networking fundamentals, including common protocols and infrastructure components.

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to write clear technical specifications and architecture diagrams.

• Familiarity with visualization and analytics frameworks such as Grafana.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Change Data Capture (CDC)

• Experience with scaling large, multi-tenant observability systems including ingest, analysis and alerting

• Experience with SNMP, sFlow/NetFlow, gNMI and similar telemetry technologies

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS systems with security and compliance awareness (e.g., SOC 2).

• Experience deploying and operating services in Kubernetes and AWS.

• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor).

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.