Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at a core SaaS concern: turning continuous customer telemetry into reliable, searchable signals in a multi-tenant environment. Core ingest is where product promises meet operational reality, and the listing’s emphasis on petabyte-scale pipelines, low latency, and fault tolerance reflects the kind of platform engineering that underpins modern observability and security SaaS.
For a long-term SaaS engineering path, the work translates into durable strengths in operating always-on services, designing for noisy neighbors, and evolving distributed architectures without breaking customer workloads. Experience with Kafka, container orchestration, and microservices maps cleanly to many data-intensive SaaS domains, while the cross-team interfaces with Search, Security, and Metrics & Tracing mirror how platform teams influence multiple product surfaces through shared infrastructure.
The role is best suited to an experienced engineer who prefers high-leverage backend problems over feature-layer delivery and is comfortable balancing code quality with operational constraints. It will fit someone who enjoys technical leadership through design reviews and pragmatic system improvements, and who is motivated by measurable outcomes like throughput, reliability, and predictable performance in production.
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 - Core Ingest
The proliferation of machine log data has the potential to give organizations unprecedented real-time visibility into their infrastructure and operations. With this opportunity comes tremendous technical challenges around ingesting, managing, and understanding high-volume streams of heterogeneous data.
As a Staff Software Engineer - Core Ingest, you will actively contribute and lead engineers in the design and development of new distributed data processing capabilities. You will be instrumental in helping us solve complex, low-latency, distributed systems challenges to handle our ever-increasing scale. Our system is a highly distributed, fault-tolerant, multi-tenant platform that includes bleeding-edge components related to storage, messaging, search, and analytics. This system ingests and analyzes petabytes of data a day, while making exabytes of data available for search and forensic analysis.
You are a strong software engineer who is passionate about large-scale systems. You care about producing clean, elegant, maintainable, robust, well-tested code; you do this as a member of a team, helping the group come up with a better solution than you would as individuals. Ideally, you have experience with performance, scalability, and reliability issues of 24x7 commercial services.
Responsibilities:
- Designing and implementing extremely high-volume, fault-tolerant, scalable backend systems that process and manage petabytes of customer data.
- Work to improve algorithms built to schedule load on clusters of thousands of machines elastically at runtime.
- Experience in multi-threaded programming and distributed systems
- Improve systems to provide performance guarantees to customers in a shared-everything multi-tenant architecture.
- Lead and contribute to the re-architecting of our internal message processing technology to petabyte per day scale.
- Help manage exabytes of data using the latest and greatest technologies such as Kafka, Kubernetes, and Docker.
- Work across Sumo, interfacing with multiple teams, including Search, Security, and Metrics & Tracing, to identify requirements and architect solutions to meet their data core ingest needs.
Requirements:
- B.S. or higher in Computer Sciences or related discipline (M.S. a plus)
- 6-8+ years of industry experience with a proven track record of ownership and delivery
- Experience developing scalable distributed data processing solutions
- Experience in multi-threaded programming
- Experience in running large scalable distributed services following a microservice architecture
- Experience in Apache Kafka
- Hands-on object-oriented programming experience (e.g., Java, Scala)
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Understand performance characteristics of commonly used data structures (maps, lists, trees, etc).
Desirable:
- Experience in big data and/or 24x7 commercial service is highly desirable.
- You should be happy working with Unix (Linux, OS X).
- Agile software development experience (test-driven development, iterative and incremental development) is a plus.
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.
