Company:Honeycomb (Small)
Location: Remote (US)
Role Type: Full-time
Compensation: $200,000 – $260,000
Sentiment: High
Rating: 5/5
Description
Honeycomb is the observability platform for production software. The Staff Engineer role on the Query Engine team owns the distributed query planner and columnar storage layer that powers real-time trace analysis at massive scale.
Key Requirements
Deep backend systems experience (Go preferred)
Experience with query engines, columnar storage, or distributed systems
Staff-level: sets technical direction across multiple teams
Strong writer; Honeycomb is engineering-blog-culture
Interview Log
2026-03-22: Recruiter screen (30 min) — strong interest from both sides
2026-04-02: Engineering interview 1 — systems design (distributed tracing pipeline at scale); feedback: positive, moved forward
2026-04-09: Engineering interview 2 — coding (wrote a columnar filter executor in Go); feedback: passed
2026-04-17: Bar raiser / values interview with Charity Majors — discussed observability philosophy, incident culture
Next Steps
Final panel scheduled 2026-04-24: 3 engineers, 1 PM, 1 EM
Prepare: "tell me about a time you changed technical direction on a large project"
Send thank-you notes to all interviewers before 2026-04-22