Senior Software Engineer, Billing Platform

Senior Software Engineer · Senior · Full Time

San Francisco, CaliforniaUSD 190k – 240k1mo ago
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Role

What you'll do.

Senior Software Engineer on Sentry's Billing Platform responsible for architecting and scaling core billing infrastructure that processes hundreds of billions of events daily with financial-grade accuracy. This role combines distributed systems expertise, financial accuracy requirements, and cross-functional collaboration with product, finance, and sales teams to build flexible pricing systems that directly impact company revenue and customer trust.

Responsibilities

  • Architect and Scale Billing Infrastructure Systems: Design and build core billing systems that process hundreds of billions of events daily while maintaining financial-grade accuracy and low-latency performance across distributed infrastructure at global scale.
  • Develop Usage Tracking Pipeline: Collaborate on engineering the next-generation usage tracking pipeline that accurately measures and processes diverse observable event types including errors, logs, traces, and tokens with guaranteed financial accuracy.
  • Design Flexible Pricing Primitives: Create scalable pricing system architecture supporting variable billing models from per-event consumption-based billing to complex enterprise contracts, enabling rapid product experimentation while maintaining revenue accuracy and reducing time-to-market.
  • Solve Distributed Systems Data Consistency Challenges: Contribute to technical architecture decisions addressing billing-specific data consistency requirements including event delay handling, retroactive pricing changes, distributed count reconciliation, and ensuring perfect alignment between customer bills and actual usage.
  • Cross-Functional Technical Leadership: Partner across product, BizOps, sales, marketing, and leadership teams to translate business requirements into technical architecture; ensure architectural decisions drive revenue impact and influence board-level metrics.
  • Ensure Financial Correctness and System Reliability: Build and maintain systems where reliability encompasses both uptime and financial correctness, with emphasis on customer trust through transparent, accurate billing and zero revenue leakage across high-volume transaction processing.

Qualifications

What we look for.

Technical

  • Distributed Systems Architecture

    Expert-level experience designing and implementing large-scale distributed systems, with deep understanding of data consistency patterns, eventual consistency models, and handling challenges like clock skew and network partitions at massive scale.

  • High-Accuracy, High-Volume Data Processing

    Proven track record building systems that process billions of events with guaranteed accuracy requirements, including understanding of stream processing, batch processing, and hybrid architectures for financial-grade reliability.

  • Financial Systems and Reconciliation

    Experience with billing, payment processing, or financial systems where accuracy is non-negotiable; understanding of reconciliation patterns, double-entry bookkeeping principles, and audit trail requirements.

  • Backend System Design at Scale

    Strong expertise designing backend infrastructure supporting complex business logic, handling retroactive data changes, managing state consistency, and supporting multiple pricing models simultaneously.

  • Data Pipeline Engineering

    Experience designing and maintaining robust data pipelines for high-volume event processing, including considerations for latency, throughput, data quality, and failure recovery in production environments.

Education

  • Computer Science or Related Field

    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating advanced systems design and software engineering expertise.

Experience

  • Building High-Stakes Accuracy Systems

    Demonstrated success architecting or significantly improving systems where accuracy failures have direct financial or critical business impact, requiring meticulous attention to edge cases and comprehensive testing.

  • Mentoring Through Ambiguous High-Stakes Projects

    Proven ability to mentor and guide engineering teams through complex, ambiguous problems with significant business implications, fostering decision-making frameworks and technical clarity under uncertainty.

  • Operating Mission-Critical Services

    Experience operating services where reliability encompasses both infrastructure uptime and financial correctness, with understanding of monitoring, alerting, and incident response for revenue-impacting systems.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration at Scale

    Demonstrated ability working across product, finance, operations, and sales teams, translating business requirements into technical strategies while maintaining technical integrity and managing competing priorities.

Skills

Required

  • Distributed Systems Design

    Expert-level proficiency in designing fault-tolerant, scalable distributed systems with strong understanding of consensus protocols, eventual consistency, CAP theorem, and practical tradeoffs.

  • Backend System Architecture

    Advanced ability to design and implement complex backend systems supporting multiple concurrent concerns: scalability, reliability, financial accuracy, and operational maintainability.

  • Data Consistency and Reconciliation

    Strong expertise in ensuring data accuracy across distributed systems, implementing reconciliation algorithms, handling duplicate detection, and managing state consistency at scale.

  • Production Systems Reliability

    Deep operational experience running production systems at scale, including monitoring strategy, incident response, performance optimization, and zero-downtime deployment patterns.

  • Technical Leadership and Mentoring

    Demonstrated ability to lead technical initiatives, mentor junior engineers, make architectural decisions collaboratively, and drive consensus on complex technical tradeoffs.

Preferred

  • Event Streaming and Stream Processing

    Nice to have

    Experience with event streaming platforms and stream processing frameworks for handling high-volume, real-time data pipelines with exactly-once or at-least-once semantics.

  • Billing and Monetization Systems

    Nice to have

    Prior experience building or significantly improving billing, usage metering, or subscription management systems, with understanding of different pricing models and contract management.

  • Open Source Software Development

    Nice to have

    Contributions to or familiarity with open source software development practices, including performance optimization, API design for multiple consumers, and maintaining backward compatibility.

  • Developer Tools and Observability

    Nice to have

    Experience building developer-facing tools or observability infrastructure, understanding the unique requirements and pain points of engineering teams as customers.

  • Multi-Tenant Systems Architecture

    Nice to have

    Experience designing systems serving multiple customers with varying requirements, including isolation strategies, tenant-specific customization, and fair resource allocation.

Tech stack

Languages

PythonGoTypeScript/JavaScript

Frameworks

Event Stream ProcessingMessage Queuing SystemsDistributed Consensus

Databases

PostgreSQLTime-Series DatabasesDocument StoresRedis/Cache Layer

Tools

KubernetesPrometheus/GrafanaGit/GitHubTerraform/Infrastructure as Code

Other

Distributed TracingFinancial Audit and CompliancePricing Model Design

Compensation

Pay and benefits.

Base·USD 190,000 – 240,000

Equity·Stock options

Benefits

  • Equity Grants

    Participation in Sentry's equity compensation program, providing ownership stake and upside alignment with company performance.

  • Comprehensive Health Insurance

    Group health insurance coverage including medical, dental, and vision benefits for employee and family members.

  • Paid Time Off

    Competitive paid time off policy supporting work-life balance and employee wellness.

  • Incentive Compensation

    Performance-based bonuses and incentive programs aligned with individual and company goals.

  • Additional Employee Benefits

    Comprehensive benefits package including additional perks designed to support employee well-being and development.

Process

Interview steps.

  1. 01

    Initial Application and Screening

    Submit application through Ashby with resume highlighting relevant experience with distributed systems, billing infrastructure, and high-stakes accuracy requirements. Screening focuses on verifying technical background and alignment with core requirements.

  2. 02

    Technical Conversation with Hiring Manager

    Discussion with Billing Platform team lead covering architecture philosophy, approach to designing high-accuracy systems, and specific experience with billing or financial infrastructure.

  3. 03

    Systems Design Interview

    Deep technical discussion on designing a complex billing or usage tracking system, evaluating ability to architect solutions handling billions of events, manage financial accuracy, and navigate distributed systems tradeoffs.

  4. 04

    Technical Problem-Solving Round

    Code-based or architecture-based assessment demonstrating technical depth in relevant domain: data consistency patterns, event processing, or similar distributed systems challenges.

  5. 05

    Cross-Functional Collaboration Discussion

    Conversation with team members from product, finance, or operations covering how you approach cross-functional projects, handle competing priorities, and translate business requirements into technical solutions.

  6. 06

    Final Leadership Round

    Discussion with engineering leadership or VP of Engineering covering career trajectory, mentoring philosophy, approach to technical leadership in ambiguous situations, and alignment with Sentry's culture and values.

  7. 07

    Offer and Background Check

    Offer extended contingent on successful background check and reference verification. Compensation package includes base salary, equity, and benefits enrollment.

Full posting

Original listing.

About Sentry

Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building.

Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future.

About the team

The Billing team sits at the intersection of product, finance, and infrastructure. They're responsible for ensuring every observable event—errors, logs, traces, tokens—gets accurately measured, priced, and billed. Their work directly impacts company revenue and customer trust, requiring distributed systems expertise, attention to financial accuracy, and deep understanding of product usage patterns. The team works cross-functionally with product, engineering, BizOps, marketing, and sales to build systems that enable new products and pricing models.

About the role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will architect and scale the core systems that power Sentry's billing infrastructure, ensuring accuracy and reliability at massive scale.

 
  • You will collaborate on building the next generation of Sentry’s usage tracking pipeline, processing hundreds of billions of events daily with low latency and financial-grade accuracy.

  • You will help design flexible pricing primitives that support everything from per-event usage billing to complex enterprise contracts, enabling product and sales teams to experiment rapidly while maintaining revenue accuracy and reduced time-to-market for new products.

  • You will contribute to technical decisions on data consistency challenges unique to billing—like handling event delays, retroactive pricing changes, and distributed count reconciliation across our infrastructure.

You'll love this job if you

  • Want to solve the "easy to explain, hard to build" problems—like ensuring a customer's bill matches their usage perfectly, even when processing hundreds of billions of events daily across distributed systems.

  • Thrive on constraints that force elegant design: financial accuracy is non-negotiable, customer trust depends on billing transparency, and the system must scale with Sentry's user and product growth without rearchitecting every year.

  • Enjoy partnering across the organization—from BizOps and sales to marketing and leadership—where your code directly impacts ARR and your architectural decisions show up in board-level metrics.

To thrive in this role, you have

  • Built or significantly improved systems with high-stakes accuracy requirements.

  • Mentored engineers through ambiguous, high-stakes projects.

  • Operated services where reliability includes uptime and also financial correctness.

The base salary range (or hourly wage range, if applicable) that Sentry reasonably expects to pay for this position is $190,000 to $280,000. A successful candidate’s actual base salary (or hourly wage) amount will be determined by a variety of relevant factors including, without limitation, the candidate’s work location, education, work and other relevant experience, skills, and job-related knowledge. A successful candidate will be eligible to participate in Sentry’s employee benefit plans/programs applicable to the candidate’s position (including incentive compensation, equity grants, paid time off, and group health insurance coverage). See Sentry Benefits for more details about the Company’s benefit plans/programs.

 

Equal Opportunity at Sentry

Sentry is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to its employees and candidates for employment regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, or other legally-protected characteristic. This commitment includes the provision of reasonable accommodations to employees and candidates for employment with physical or mental disabilities who require such accommodations in order to (a) perform the essential functions of their jobs, or (b) seek employment with Sentry. We strive to build a diverse team, with an inclusive culture where every teammate can thrive. Sentry is an open-source company because we believe that everyone, everywhere, should have the ability and tools to make great software. Software should be accessible. That starts with making our industry accessible.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected].

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