Senior Software Engineer, Issue Detection

About Sentry

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.

Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

About the role

Issue Detection decides when something is wrong in a developer's application. Today that mostly means individual errors, and teams still set up alerts by hand to find out when something bigger breaks. That's changing. Sentry already sees enough of an application to recognize an outage, an error spike, a regression or a failing dependency on its own, for every project, without anyone configuring a monitor.

Detection is the first step of a longer flow. Before anyone is paged, Sentry should check whether the signal is real. When it is, the right people should hear about it where they already work, with what broke, when it started, who's affected and what changed, while Seer works out the root cause and drafts a fix. The goal is that an incident is understood within minutes of it starting.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Issue Detection team, you'll build the systems that make this happen. This space is moving fast and we expect what we ship to change substantially as agents take on more of the work.

In this role you will

• Detect incidents by default. Build detection that recognizes outages, error spikes and regressions on every project with no setup, and that people and agents can adjust when they need to.

• Decide what's real before anyone is paged. Check each signal against what Sentry knows about the application, its traffic, releases and history, so detection can fire early without false alarms. Everything that happens next, from the first notification to Seer's investigation, starts from what you detect.

• Detect more than errors. Find slow queries, failing dependencies and other problems in performance data on our shared detector platform. Detection runs on Kafka-fed pipelines processing billions of events a day, so it has to be fast and cheap enough to run for every customer.

• Own projects end to end. Scope work with product and design, make the technical calls, ship it, measure whether it worked, and keep improving it. Help the engineers around you do the same.

You’ll love this job if you

• Are comfortable when the ground keeps moving. How teams find out about and respond to production problems is changing every few months. You'd rather design for where that's going than keep tuning hand-configured alerts.

• Like problems you can measure. You can see which incidents were real, how quickly the right person heard about them and how long they stayed open. You'll make precision, recall and latency tradeoffs with real data.

• Want to design from the outcome. Start from what the best incident experience looks like for a developer, from first signal to fix, and work back to the systems you own, even when that means replacing something we already have.

• Want to use what you build. We debug Sentry with Sentry, including our own incidents. You'll be responsible for what you ship, and you'll use that experience to decide what we detect next.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering, much of it on backend systems in Python

• You've owned a high-volume data pipeline or stream processor in production

• You've built alerting, anomaly detection or monitoring that people relied on, and tuned its precision and recall with real data

• You've responded to production incidents and know what slows a response down

• You're comfortable moving quickly and iterating toward an ideal solution

• You're product-minded and care about what the person getting paged actually sees

• You communicate clearly in writing and in person

Equal Opportunity at Sentry

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at accommodations@sentry.io .

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