Senior Software Engineer II - Agentic Intelligence

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><div><strong>What We’re Building</strong></div> <div>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! </div> <div> </div> <div>If you want to see what we’ve been up to, please check out these <a href="https://www.honeycomb.io/blog" target="_blank">blog posts</a> and Honeycomb.io <a href="https://www.honeycomb.io/category/press-releases" target="_blank">press releases</a>. </div> <div> </div> <div><strong>Who We Are</strong></div> <div>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 <a class="postings-link" href="https://www.honeycomb.io/about/" target="_blank"><u>our values</u></a> every day. We want our people to do what they truly love amongst a team of highly talented (but humble) peers.</div> <div> </div> <div><strong>How We Work</strong></div> <div>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</div></div><h4 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">About the role</h4> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">AI agents at Honeycomb investigate, reason, and act on real observability data. They live in Canvas: the agentic workspace where engineers go to understand their systems.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">The Agentic Intelligence team has shipped Canvas, the Honeycomb MCP server, and the Canvas Agent and Canvas Skills surfaces. What we're looking for today is someone who brings deep agent expertise and uses it to expand what the team can build: new agents, new surface area in Canvas, memory, spatial awareness, improved performance on our Bedrock loop.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Honeycomb's data store is fast and accepts high cardinality data; that's what makes agents built on top of it different from anything built on a conventional observability backend. This role is about taking advantage of that building agents that can do things no other observability product can do because the underlying data makes it possible.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal">Some of this work will start as a prototype. The expectation is that the code makes it through the full arc, from the rough first version through to something that holds up in production.</p> <h4 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">What you'll do</h4> <ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3 print:block print:space-y-1"> <li class="font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2"><strong>Design and deliver production-grade agents.</strong> Build agents that investigate, reason, and act on live observability data inside Canvas. These agents must be trustworthy to engineers in high pressure situations, including mid-incident. Take one from rough first version to something that holds up under production traffic.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2"><strong>Own the agent work; support the whole product.</strong> Scope, build, ship, and maintain the agents including the evals that tell you whether they got better or are just different. This role is agent-focused and also includes some fullstack development.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2"><strong>Build agents only Honeycomb can build.</strong> Use a data store that returns high-cardinality queries in seconds to reason over signal a conventional backend can't serve at this fidelity correlating across services, drilling into a single trace, comparing before and after a deploy.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2"><strong>Extend the surface, and decide what's next.</strong> Ship new capability into Canvas, the MCP server, and Canvas Skills memory, spatial awareness, a faster Bedrock loop and make the case for what comes after with working code. Distinguish hype from signal in a field with plenty of both.</li> <li class="font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2"><strong>Define what "good" means for agents here.</strong> Set the bar: measurable against real evals, maintainable, and honest about their limits.</li> </ul> <h4 class="text-text-100 mt-2 -mb-1 text-base font-bold">Example projects</h4> <ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1…