Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Modern SaaS observability and security products increasingly differentiate on analytics: how quickly customers can interrogate massive streams of logs, metrics, and traces. This Staff Software Engineer role sits at that leverage point, working on a query engine that operates at exabyte scale and directly influences the quality and responsiveness of customer-facing investigations. The remit signals a mature, high-throughput SaaS platform where efficiency and reliability are product features, not just internal concerns.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work builds durable expertise in multi-tenant data systems, distributed performance tuning, and the operational economics of running always-on services. Ownership of CPU and memory efficiency, plus instrumentation for cost-per-service visibility, maps closely to how leading SaaS companies manage margins and platform sustainability. The inclusion of on-call and production troubleshooting also strengthens end-to-end judgment that transfers across infrastructure-heavy SaaS domains.
This position fits engineers who prefer deep systems work and measurable outcomes, rather than feature delivery alone. It will suit someone comfortable balancing latency, correctness, and cost, and who enjoys mentoring and leading projects in a microservices environment. A remote, multi-time-zone setup also favors clear written communication and disciplined execution habits.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Staff Software Engineer - Data Query
As a Staff backend engineer on the Data Query team, you will build a scalable, reliable, and performant analytics platform for observability and security products, enabling customers to rapidly perform high-quality, real-time analyses of events and incidents. The Data Query team manages the engine for querying exabytes of logs data, millions of metrics data points, and terabytes of tracing data every day. Your core responsibilities include designing and implementing highly performant code to minimize CPU and memory overhead, directly impacting our platform’s operational costs and performance.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement extremely high-volume, fault-tolerant, scalable backend systems that process and manage petabytes of customer data
- Resource Efficiency: Optimize code to reduce latency and resource footprint in a microservices environment
- Write robust code: demonstrate its robustness through automated tests
- Cost Tracking: Implement telemetry and logging to help the PM team track granular cost-per-service metrics
- Operational Excellence: Participate in on-call rotations and help troubleshoot performance bottlenecks in production
- Work as a member of a team, helping the team respond quickly and effectively to business needs
Requirements
- B.Tech, M.Tech, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related discipline
- 8+ years of industry experience with a proven track record of ownership
- Object-oriented experience, for example, in Java, Scala, Ruby, or C++
- Understand the performance characteristics of commonly used data structures (maps, lists, trees, etc)
- Experience in building backend services for handling data at a large scale
- Experience leading projects and mentoring engineers
- Comfortable working with a remote team operating in multiple time zones
Desirable:
- Experience in multi-threaded programming and distributed systems
- Experience in big data and/or 24x7 commercial service
- Agile software development experience (test-driven development, iterative and incremental development)
About Us
Sumo Logic, Inc. helps make the digital world secure, fast, and reliable by unifying critical security and operational data through its Intelligent Operations Platform. Built to address the increasing complexity of modern cybersecurity and cloud operations, we empower digital teams to move from reaction to readiness—combining agentic, AI-powered SIEM and log analytics into a single platform to detect, investigate, and resolve modern challenges. Customers around the world rely on Sumo Logic for trusted insights to protect against security threats, ensure reliability, and gain powerful insights into their digital environments. For more information, visit www.sumologic.com.
Sumo Logic Privacy Policy. Employees will be responsible for complying with applicable federal privacy laws and regulations, as well as organizational policies related to data protection.
The expected annual base salary range for this position is $191,000.00 - $224,000.00. Compensation varies based on a variety of factors, including (but not limited to) role level, skills and competencies, qualifications, knowledge, location, and experience. In addition to base pay, certain roles are eligible to participate in our bonus or commission plans, as well as our benefits offerings and equity awards.
Must be authorized to work in the United States at the time of hire and for the duration of employment. At this time, we are not able to offer non-immigrant visa sponsorship for this position.
