Senior Software Engineer -Alerts

We are a global team of innovators and pioneers dedicated to shaping the future of observability. At New Relic, we build an intelligent platform that empowers companies to thrive in an AI-first world by giving them unparalleled insight into their complex systems. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we're looking for passionate people to join our mission. If you're ready to help the world's best companies optimize their digital applications, we invite you to explore a career with us!   Your opportunity At New Relic, we love making tools for software and ops engineers. Our software helps customers answer their most important questions by allowing them to visualize, explore, and reason about their ops, application, and customer data — and to know the moment something goes wrong. If you love scale and want to contribute to one of the largest and fastest-growing streaming data platforms in the world, we'd love to hear from you. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Alerts teams within the Applied Intelligence group, focused on the backend services that ingest, persist, and retrieve the signal data powering New Relic's alerting platform. This is a backend role at the heart of a customer-facing product. You'll spend your days deep in Java/Kotlin services, distributed data systems, and high-throughput pipelines — but the work you ship directly shapes what customers see, how quickly they're notified when their systems are in trouble, and how confident they feel in the platform. We're looking for someone who treats data logistics, persistence, and retrieval at scale as a customer experience problem, not just an engineering one — someone who debates API schemas with the end user in mind and consults with frontend developers early in the design process. What you'll do Work collaboratively on a team using agile practices to ship software incrementally with frequent customer feedback Design, develop, and deploy backend services in Java/Kotlin that process high-volume telemetry and alerting workloads, with reliability and customer impact top of mind Collaborate with product managers and engineers who specialize in high-throughput data streaming systems, computing infrastructure, design, UIs, and customer-facing APIs Implement exciting new Alerting features that affect our entire pipeline, and also help reduce tech debt and retire old architecture Advocate for architecture improvements, provide future direction, and clearly articulate reasons why while assessing tradeoffs Develop and deploy your code to customers multiple times per day Be part of a small team of engineers collectively accountable for the reliability and security of the team's software Write clean, well-tested, and maintainable code; participate in peer code reviews and contribute to internal technical documentation Maintain a work-life balance that enables you to thrive by leveraging flex time-off, ten weeks of paid parental leave, and our DataNerds4Good volunteer time off program Submit PRs to other teams' codebases with low friction by providing the context the team needs to understand and approve the changes This role requires 5+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, preferably in a SaaS or product-based environment Strong proficiency in Java (Kotlin actually, but willingness is fine). You should have a solid grasp of OOP principles, RESTful APIs, and multi-threaded programming Experience building multi-threaded Java services and shipping reliable high-throughput services to customers in a production environment Experience with relational databases: complex SQL, optimization, pagination, partitioning, and scaling Experience working with distributed systems and an understanding of how to write code and queries that perform at scale Experience delivering APIs consumed by internal and/or external customers Demonstrated empathy for the end user — you understand that backend data logistics, persistence, and retrieval at scale directly affect what customers experience, and you make engineering decisions with that impact in mind Experience working in an agile environment characterized by rapid change Strong interpersonal skills, including the ability to seek consensus, lead by example, and exhibit persistence and tenacity Bonus points if you have AI & LLM Development: Hands-on experience building with LLMs and AI agents — designing prompts, integrating LLM APIs, building retrieval-augmented workflows, evaluating model output quality, or developing/maintaining MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to expose telemetry data to AI agents. A genuine curiosity about how agentic systems are reshaping observability is a strong plus Familiarity with message queuing systems and streaming patterns like Kafka (preferred), Flink, Spark Streaming, AMQP (RabbitMQ), or gRPC Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform Cloud computing experience (compute, storag