Executive engineering leader responsible for shaping product and technology strategy, aligning the executive team, communicating direction across a distributed organization, and leading engineering managers, directors, and individual contributors through rapid AI-driven change. The role requires technical credibility, strategic judgment, strong written and verbal communication, and experience scaling distributed engineering organizations while maintaining performance and culture.
What We’re Building
Honeycomb is a service for the near and present future, defining observability and raising expectations of what developer tools can do! We’re working with well known companies like HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard and more across a range of industries. This is an exciting time in our trajectory, we’ve closed Series D funding, scaled past the 200-person mark, and were named to Forbes’ America’s Best Startups of 2022 and 2023!
If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these blog posts and Honeycomb.io press releases.
Who We Are
We come for the impact, and stay for the culture! We’re a talented, opinionated, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of bees. We have conviction and we strive to live our values every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.
How We Work
We are a fully distributed company, which means we believe it is not where you sit, but how you deliver that matters most. We invest in our people and care about how you orient to our culture and processes. At the same time we imbue a lot of trust, autonomy, and accountability from Day 1. #LI-Remote
Little more about the team:
AI is changing how software gets built, shipped, and run. It is increasing the need for sense-making of production software systems. We believe AI will reshape observability itself. Honeycomb created this category, and we want our next engineering leader to help us lead its reinvention.
The role
You’ll join the executive team as a full partner in setting strategy. Our exec team acts as a first team, working closely together to revise our strategy as the world changes. Right now, it is changing often! You’ll bring a wealth of experience and an imagination of what’s possible, help sharpen our bets, and decide with your peers the most elegant way forward. Then you’ll shape a strong engineering org to deliver on these decisions.
What you’ll do
- Shape the strategy. Form your own view of where the product, technology and market are heading. Bring it to your closest partners: product and the CEO, and to the wider exec team. Some of our bets will need sharpening, and some new ones will need making.
- Build alignment at the top. We believe our strength as a company depends on the strength of our exec team. We want you to make our exec team better, and for your first team to be the exec team. You’ll work closely with product and the CEO, challenging and being challenged in return, until the team is truly committed to a shared direction.
- Help the whole org to make sense of fast change. When the ground moves quickly, people need help understanding what is changing and why. Burnout is high in our industry, and we want to keep our people motivated, excited to come to work, and with their full creativity and energy. You’ll explain engineering’s direction clearly and repeatedly, to engineers, managers, the exec team, and the rest of the company. We’re remote-first, so much of this happens in writing and in presentations.
- Lead a high-performing team into what’s next. We have strong managers, directors, and ICs. You’ll aim that talent at our biggest opportunities and adjust the org’s structure, goals, and ways of working to be continually more effective. You’ll do this without losing what makes the team great.
- Lead from technical credibility. You can’t lead an AI era shift without a deep understanding of the ergonomics of the landslide of change underway.
You might be a fit if
- You’ve led engineering through large scale changes in direction, not just growth.
- You’ve shipped software with AI tools yourself within the last 12 months.
- You have a special talent for collaboration and improving executive teams.
- You’re as interested in shaping strategy as in executing it.
- You’ve worked at a larger company, and know what breaks as companies scale. But have a risk tolerance of someone from an early stage startup.
- You’re comfortable with uncertainty, rapid change, and shaping new bets towards product-market fit.
- You’ve led distributed teams and communicate well in writing and in person.
- You care about developer tools and have good taste in them. (Having used Honeycomb is a bonus, not a requirement)
- You share our values.
Worth reading: How we do business at Honeycomb in the AI era, our AI norms and values, and why engineering is all in on AI.
If you match some of this but not all of it, please apply anyway. We’d rather talk to a strong candidate who doubts themselves than miss them.
What you'll get when you join the Hive:
- A stake in our success - generous equity with employee-friendly stock program
- It’s not about how strong of a negotiator you are - our pay is based on transparent levels relative to experience
- Time to recharge with unlimited PTO
- A distributed-first mindset and culture (really!)
- Home office, co-working, and internet stipend
- Full benefits coverage for employees, with additional coverage available for dependents
- Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, regardless of path to parenthood
- Annual development allowance
- And much more...
Please note we cannot currently sponsor or support visa transfers at this time. Additionally, in compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work.
Phishing and Recruitment Scam Warning:
We take your security seriously. Please be aware that recruitment scams are increasingly common and scammers may create email addresses or websites to impersonate Honeycomb employees. To help protect you:
- All communications will come from an @honeycomb.io email address
- We occasionally work with external recruiting agencies. These partners will use legitimate business email addresses—never personal accounts like Gmail or Yahoo.
- Our recruiting process will never ask you to provide financial or sensitive personal information, including but not limited to:
- Social security or tax identification numbers
- Credit card numbers
- Bank account information
Diversity & Accommodations:
We're committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace—where people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences, and abilities are welcomed, valued, and supported. We recognize that there is no single path to success and embrace nontraditional career journeys and diverse perspectives as key to building stronger, more innovative teams.
We strive to ensure an inclusive experience throughout every stage of our hiring process and are happy to provide reasonable accommodations as needed. If you require accommodations or accessible formats at any point during our hiring process, please let your recruiter know.
As an equal opportunity employer our hiring process is designed to put you at ease and help you show your best work. If there’s anything we can do to improve your experience, we’re always open to feedback.
Privacy Notice:
If you apply for a job at Honeycomb and your application is unsuccessful (or you withdraw from the process or decline our offer), Honeycomb will retain your information after your application for a period of time in accordance with local laws. We retain this information for various reasons, including in case we face a legal challenge in respect of a recruitment decision, to consider you for other current or future jobs at Honeycomb, and to help us better understand, analyze and improve our recruitment processes.
For more information regarding our privacy practices please see the Honeycomb Privacy Notice.
If you do not want us to retain your information, or want us to update it, please contact [email protected]. Please note, however, that we may retain some information if required by law or as necessary to protect ourselves from legal claims.
Honeycomb.io San Francisco, California, USA Office
Our HQ is amongst the historic buildings in downtown San Francisco, but our workspace is truly anywhere - our couches, on beaches, and home offices!
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