---
title: 'Lead Software Engineer - Java at New Relic'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-software-engineer-java-new-relic-portland-oregon-av4k50b4f4kj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Lead Software Engineer - Java at New Relic

- **Company:** New Relic
- **Location:** Portland Oregon, United States
- **Compensation:** $186k–$233k
- **Posted:** 2026-09-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/newrelic/jobs/5418578008

## Job description

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

We're hiring a Lead Software Engineer for our team within New Relic's Data Platform, responsible for managing ingest into NRDB—New Relic's purpose-built telemetry datastore that ingests, stores, and retrieves metrics, events, logs, and traces at massive scale. Our team sits at the front of that pipeline, putting our work directly in the critical path for every signal that reaches a New Relic customer.

As a Lead, you'll set technical direction for the team: owning architecture and design decisions, weighing the hard tradeoffs, and leading a team of engineers through resolving complex problems in high-throughput distributed systems. You'll coach and grow the engineers around you, work closely with product and partner teams to translate roadmap priorities into technical plans, and represent the team's technical point of view beyond it by contributing to standards and shared resources used throughout New Relic.

We operate a fleet of Kubernetes-managed services built primarily in Java, with Kafka as the backbone for inter-service communication and a cell-based architecture. In doing so, our team solves engineering challenges and works with data at a scale rarely matched in the industry. If the idea of working on complex systems that process millions of messages per second and handle petabytes of data excites you, then you may be an excellent fit!

## What you'll do

- Weigh tradeoffs between performance, maintainability, and operational cost when making architecture calls for our ingest systems
- Scope, estimate, and own delivery of complex, multi-engineer projects from design to GA
- Evaluate and introduce new tools, patterns, and technologies for the team — including LLM-assisted development practices where they are a logical fit
- Stay hands-on — write and ship production code regularly alongside the team you lead
- Develop engineers through code review, technical feedback, and career mentorship
- Communicate technical risk and tradeoffs in terms stakeholders can act on
- Own the operational health of the systems you lead — CI/CD, observability, and incident response
- Spot gaps in our tools, documentation, or team coverage — and make sure they get closed

This role requires

- 7–10 years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading or acting as a technical lead for a team or major initiative
- Deep fluency in Java or a comparable OOP language, with the ability to ramp quickly across other languages and frameworks the team uses
- Experience running stateful distributed services in production under unpredictable load, including debugging complex failure states and captaining incident remediation efforts
- Experience leading architecture and design reviews for complex systems
- Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, CI/CD tooling (Argo CD or similar), event-driven architectures (Kafka or similar) and container orchestration (Kubernetes or similar)
- Experience with data modeling and query optimization against relational databases at scale
- A track record of mentoring engineers and giving feedback that improves a team's output, not just your own
- Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to make a technical case to non-technical stakeholders

Bonus points if you have

- Infrastructure-as-code experience across multiple environments and cloud providers (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
- Experience querying or reasoning about time-series or telemetry data (e.g., NRQL, PromQL, or similar)
- Experience with formal SRE practices — Managing SLOs and error budgets, capacity planning, or chaos/failure testing at scale
- Secure-by-default design experience (OWASP familiarity, secure coding practices, tools like Snyk/SonarQube)
- Contributions to open source projects

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

#LI-GK1 #LI-Remote The pay range below represents a reasonable estimate of the salary for the listed position. This role is eligible for a corporate bonus plan. Pay within this range varies by work location and may also depend on job-related factors such as an applicant’s skills, qualifications, and experience.

New Relic provides a variety of benefits for this role, including healthcare, dental, vision, parental leave and planning, and mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, flex time-off, 11 paid holidays, volunteer time-off, and other competitive benefits designed to improve the lives of our employees.

Estimated Base Pay Range $186,000—$233,000 USD

Fostering a diverse, welcoming and inclusive environment is important to us. We work hard to make everyone feel comfortable bringing their best, most authentic selves to work every day. We celebrate our talented Relics’ different backgrounds and abilities, and recognize the different paths they took to reach us – including nontraditional ones. Their experiences and perspectives inspire us to make our products and company the best they can be. We’re looking for people who feel connected to our mission and values, not just candidates who check off all the boxes.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application or recruiting process, please reach out to resume@newrelic.com.

We believe in empowering all Relics to achieve professional and business success through a flexible workforce model. This model allows us to work in a variety of workplaces that best support our success, including fully office-based, fully remote, or hybrid.

Our hiring process

In compliance with applicable law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work and to complete employment eligibility verification. Note: Our stewardship of the data of thousands of customers means that a criminal background check is required to join New Relic.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records based on individual circumstances and in accordance with applicable law including, but not limited to, the [San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance](https://sfgov.org/olse/sites/default/files/FCO%20poster2020.pdf).

Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. New Relic does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes, and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with New Relic.

New Relic develops and distributes encryption software and technology that complies with U.S. export controls and licensing requirements. Certain New Relic roles require candidates to pass an export compliance assessment as a condition of employment in any global location. If relevant, we will provide more information later in the application process.

Candidates are evaluated based on qualifications, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression or identity, age, disability, neurodiversity, veteran or marital status, political viewpoint, or other legally protected characteristics.

Review our Applicant Privacy Notice at https://newrelic.com/termsandconditions/applicant-privacy-policy

## About New Relic

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: New Relic provides an intelligent observability platform that helps engineers monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize their software, infrastructure, and AI applications in real time.
- **Entity Type**: Private (acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG in a $6.5 billion take-private deal in 2024; formerly public on NYSE under ticker NEWR)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2008
- **Founders**: Lew Cirne

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Observability Platform / Application Performance Monitoring (APM) / Software Development
- **Target customers**: B2B, serving engineering and IT teams at enterprises, SMBs, and digital-native companies across industries.
- **Mission statement**: Eliminate interruptions for digital business.

## Products & Services
- **[New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform](https://newrelic.com/)**: A unified, full-stack SaaS platform that ingests metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) to provide end-to-end visibility. Includes APM, infrastructure monitoring, digital experience monitoring (RUM), logs, security, and AI-powered observability.
- **[New Relic AI](https://newrelic.com/)**: A generative AI assistant that helps engineers trace agent reasoning to code execution, identify hallucinations, control AI costs, and accelerate root cause analysis.
- **[AI and Agentic Monitoring](https://newrelic.com/)**: Dedicated capabilities to monitor AI models, agents, and LLM interactions in real time, correlating agent behavior with underlying microservices.
- **[New Relic CodeStream](https://newrelic.com/)**: Extends observability and code collaboration directly into popular development environments (IDEs).
- **Vulnerability Management & Security**: Unified vulnerability management with production impact scoring and AI-driven prioritization, plus IAST and SAP monitoring.
- **800+ pre-built integrations** with cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes, Docker, serverless frameworks, and 11 programming languages.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Acquired for approximately **$6.5 billion** in 2024 by Francisco Partners and TPG.
- **Key Metric**: **$925.6M annual revenue** (as of the acquisition); **~2,400 employees** (as of March 31, 2024); **16,000+ paying customers**.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Francisco Partners, TPG; major customers include adidas Runtastic, American Red Cross, Domino’s, GoTo Group, Ryanair, Topgolf, and William Hill.
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Named a **Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms** (12-time Leader).
  - **2.4 trillion data points queried per minute**, 5 billion data points ingested per minute, 3.1+ exabytes of data annually, 333+ billion web requests served daily with a median response time of 60ms.
  - Integrated with **NVIDIA NIM** to accelerate AI adoption and ROI.
  - Launched **Instant Observability**, the industry’s largest open-source integration ecosystem.
  - Job posting trends show **+35.3% quarterly growth** (as of mid-2025).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified platform**: Single platform for metrics, events, logs, and traces — no separate databases required, reducing complexity and cost.
- **Usage-based consumption pricing**: First in the industry to move away from host-based pricing; offers a **100 GB free tier per month** and $0.35/GB beyond, making it accessible to startups and large enterprises alike.
- **AI-native observability**: Deep integration of generative AI for root cause analysis, cost control, and hallucination detection — a differentiator in the observability market.
- **Massive data scale**: Proven ability to handle exabyte-scale telemetry with sub-60ms median query response times.
- **Open-source ecosystem**: 770+ integrations and open-source agents, fostering community and reducing vendor lock-in.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI and Agentic Monitoring**: Prioritizing capabilities to monitor and optimize AI agents, LLMs, and agentic workflows as enterprises adopt AI at scale.
- **Expanding the free tier and consumption model**: Driving adoption by lowering barriers for engineers and startups, converting them into paying customers.
- **Enterprise security and governance**: Deepening vulnerability management, IAST, and security integrations to meet enterprise compliance needs.
- **Global expansion**: 17 offices worldwide including Barcelona, Bengaluru, Berlin, Dublin, London, Melbourne, Munich, Paris, Portland, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and Zurich.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Known for "The Relic Way" — six core values: Customer Forever, One Team, Competitive Spirit, Technical Excellence, Challenger Mindset, and Results Driven. Emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion with five Employee Resource Groups (Access, Rainbow Relics, Relics of Color, Veterans@NewRelic, Women@NewRelic).
- **Work environment**: Supports **flex work arrangements** (remote/hybrid options available depending on role and location).
- **Total rewards**: Competitive pay, career development programs, professional training, generous paid time off, family healthcare, paid parental leave, emotional support assistance, NRgize wellness funds, and perks & discounts.
- **Recognition**: Named one of *Fortune*’s Best Workplaces in Technology™ (2022), *PEOPLE* Magazine’s Companies That Care (2022, 2023), and *Inc.*’s Best-Led Companies (2021). Ranked among the greenest companies by *U.S. News & World Report* (2023).
- **Engineering culture**: High technical bar with emphasis on innovation at massive scale. Engineers work on challenges involving 2.4 trillion queries per minute and exabyte-scale data pipelines. Active blog and community engagement.
- **Active hiring**: 69 active job postings (as of mid-2025) with roles in engineering, sales, AI, data science, and compliance.

## Sources
1. [New Relic Official Website](https://newrelic.com/)
2. [New Relic Careers Page](https://newrelic.com/careers)
3. [New Relic Company Fact Sheet (PDF)](https://newrelic.com/sites/default/files/2024-08/Final_Fact_Sheet_08_28_24.pdf)
4. [New Relic Culture Page](https://newrelic.com/about/culture)
5. [New Relic LinkedIn Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/new-relic-inc-)

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