At LightStep, our mission is to deliver confidence at scale for those who develop, operate, and rely upon today’s powerful software applications. We created LightStep because we understand the massive architectural transformation underway in the software industry, and we saw an opportunity to accelerate it, all while improving the quality of the developer and end-user experience. While we learned a great deal from our experiences building Dapper (Google’s distributed tracing solution) and Monarch (Google’s high-availability metrics solution), LightStep is in many ways a reaction to and a generational improvement beyond those approaches. Our story as individuals and as a company revolves around continuous learning, careful listening, and the belief that these fundamentally new software architectures require fundamentally new solutions.

The OpenTracing project defines a standard that makes understanding, building, and improving distributed systems easier. In doing so, it improves the quality of open source tools and applications across the board. LightStep wants to support that goal: we all benefit when complex software becomes self-describing. We’re looking for a teammate who is knowledgeable about popular open source technologies and best practices, eager to be an expert on distributed systems performance, and can lend a hand as a teacher, communicator, and open source code contributor to help move the OpenTracing community forward.

The OSS Engineer role is for software developers who love working on open source projects, and are interested in product management. In addition to writing code, the OSS engineers are expected to show leadership by helping others contribute, championing issues, and shaping project roadmaps and backlogs.

What our team does

• Contribute to the development of new advances in Open Source Distributed Tracing Frameworks and Libraries.
• Lead development on our public repositories and provide timely response to issues and pull requests.
• Champion and advocate for Open Source Frameworks for Distributed Tracing such as OpenTracing both internally and externally.
• Evangelize Distributed Tracing and OpenTracing at conferences, meetups, and online through social media and other forums.
• Plan and produce content supporting both LightStep and the Open Source Distributed Tracing community such as blog posts, videos, tutorials, and other media.
• Recruit and nurture new hires, contributors, and community advocates.

Valued strengths

• You are self-motivated and are great at prioritization, even when there’s “too much to do.”
• You have experience working on distributed systems and performance at scale.
• Capable of engaging with other large OSS projects and champion their adoption of OpenTracing.
• Comfortable working in multiple languages, and strong language-level expertise in at least one. Current focus is in Swift, Objective-C, C++, Python, JavaScript and PHP.
• You’re capable of mediating conflict and managing people who don’t work for you.
• You are comfortable with distributed work environment and can collaborate across time zones and cultures.

Bonus points if…

• You’re already an active participant in the OpenTracing community.
• You have previous experience managing or contributing to a large open source project.
• You’re a good teacher and public speaker.
• Have a positive voice on social media.

LightStep is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation.