Staff Field Reliability Engineer

About the Team

The Field Reliability Engineer (FRE) is an extension of Honeycomb’s extensive brand and technical expertise focused on our customer base via engagements, support and our managed services. In this role you parachute into the most complex, highest-stakes technical situations our customers face - unblocking them when they’re stuck, creating tooling, guiding our Solution Architecture team through complex decisions, and ensuring prospects and customers get the most out of Honeycomb and the broader observability ecosystem.

You’re equal parts platform engineer and customer engineer. You build and operate the managed infrastructure our largest customers depend on, and you’re the technical backstop the SA team calls when a deal gets deep into infrastructure, data pipelines, or production debugging. This isn’t a support role - it’s a technical leadership role where you solve problems that don’t have runbooks yet, build the platforms and tooling so the next person can have a runbook, and directly impact revenue by unblocking our most strategic deals.

What You’ll Do

Platform Engineering — Architecture & Standards Ownership

• Define the architecture and operational standards for Refinery as a Service (RaaS) and Honeycomb Private Cloud (HnyPC) — decisions other engineers build within — across multiple AWS accounts and regions.
• Architect the Terraform modules, Helm charts, and deployment automation that other FREs build on and extend, not just consume.
• Set the technical direction for how Honeycomb instruments, monitors, and operates its own managed infrastructure — using Honeycomb to monitor Honeycomb.
• Own capacity planning, scaling strategy, upgrade sequencing, and cost optimization across multi-region AWS environments.
• Build platforms and automation that change how the FRE team operates at scale — enabling the team to grow without proportional headcount.

Technical Escalation & Unblocking

• Serve as the final technical escalation point for the most novel, highest-stakes customer situations — problems with no precedent in existing runbooks.
• Resolve deep infrastructure and observability issues spanning distributed systems, Kubernetes clusters, AWS networking (ALBs, PrivateLink, NLBs, VPCs), and polyglo