Backend Software Engineer, Observability Product (Agent)

NetBox Labs is seeking a Backend Software Engineer to join our rapidly expanding Observability Product team, which owns the full suite of NetBox Labs observability products - from Assurance and Discovery to upcoming Telemetry and Monitoring capabilities - helping customers gain real-time network visibility, automatically discover and monitor their infrastructure, and keep configuration drift in check.

This role is focused on our open source Observability Agent (including pktvisor and discovery) and has the following requirements

• Deep knowledge of the OSI framework, networks and protocols - esp. DPI, SNMP, sFlow/NetFlow, gNMI

• Linux system and network programming experience (e.g. system calls, IPC, processes, threads, sockets)

• Experience with C++ (and/or Rust), as well as Go and Python

• Experience with eBPF helpful

Team Responsibilities

• Work with a full stack team to build and maintain open source, source available, and closed source software across our observability project portfolio – shipping to the community and delivering into our commercial cloud and on‑premise products.

• Integrate closely with NetBox’s data model to drive workflows for reconciling observed vs intended state and enriching telemetry and monitoring data.

• Define and maintain data schemas and APIs shared across products.

• Ensure observability systems meet scalability and reliability goals (SLAs/SLOs).

• Implement testing, CI/CD automation, and code quality standards across observability services.

General Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, and 2+ years in a startup environment.

• Experience in distributed systems and backend microservices development.

• Strong understanding of gRPC, protobuf, event-driven architecture, and streaming data systems.

• Experience with Redis streams, Kafka, MQTT, AMQP or other messaging systems.

• Familiarity with programmatic interaction with network infrastructure via APIs, SSH/CLI automation (e.g., Netmiko, NAPALM), or other network automation frameworks

• Familiarity with observability concepts (metrics, logs, traces) and related protocols, especially OpenTelemetry

• Strong communication skills, including the ability to write clear technical specifications with diagrams.

• Familiarity with data visualization and analytics frameworks such as Grafana

Nice to have

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS systems with security and compliance awareness (e.g., SOC 2).

• Familiarity with Mimir, Loki, ClickHouse, Elastic, or other analytical data stores.

• Familiarity with AI/ML approaches for anomaly detection or performance prediction.

• Working with or contributing to open source projects, especially in observability.

Our culture and values: 

• We own and solve problems with high attention to detail.

• Our open source contributors, users, customers & team are all part of our community. When our community wins, we win.

• We prioritize simplicity and think twice before adding complexity

• Clear communication helps keep our team aligned and collaborating smoothly.

About NetBox Labs:

NetBox Labs helps companies build and manage complex networks. We help customers accelerate network automation by delivering open, composable products and supporting the network automation community.

NetBox Labs is the commercial steward of open source NetBox, the world’s most popular network source of truth, and Orb, the next-generation open source network observability platform. Our products include NetBox Enterprise, a fully supported self-managed NetBox with advanced features, and NetBox Cloud, a secure, scalable, and reliable SaaS edition of NetBox.

NetBox powers thousands of companies, and NetBox Labs is backed by investment from Notable Capital (formerly GGV), Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, Flybridge, IBM, Salesforce Ventures, and Mango Capital.