Software Engineer – Observability, Co-op

About the Role

Ancestry seeks an exceptional, passionate, and highly motivated Software Engineer - Observability Engineer to join our Observability team. The Observability team builds and maintains all the observability tools and technologies that help Ancestry monitor the site and detect and resolve customer-impacting incidents. As a Software Engineer on the Observability team, you will lead the development of automated migration tools for OpenTelemetry-based observability platforms while contributing to sensitive data protection and infrastructure operations.

What You Will Do

• Contribute to the development of AI-powered code transformation tools leveraging foundation models (LLMs) and agentic frameworks to migrate application instrumentation to OpenTelemetry standards across multiple languages (Java, Python, Node.js, .NET) and browser-based Real User Monitoring (RUM)
• Build intelligent parsing and analysis engines using AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools to transform existing APM instrumentation code with proper error handling, validation, and comprehensive migration reports
• Design and implement LLM-driven dashboard migration tools that extract, transform, and recreate observability dashboards across platforms with functional equivalence validation
• Develop agentic alert migration automation using AI frameworks to export, transform, and migrate alerting policies, conditions, notification channels, and escalation workflows between observability platforms
• Create comprehensive validation and testing frameworks to compare metrics and traces, build migration progress dashboards, and develop rollback procedures
• Build CLI tools, scripts, and self-service migration utilities with detailed guides and best practices documentation to enable application teams
• Contribute to observability operations including log PII detection with near real-time streaming, multi-source log pipeline integration (CloudWatch, Lambda), cost optimization, and infrastructure monitoring (EKS, EC2, Lambda)
• Support Harness deployment pipeline integration with observability alerts and contribute to operational excellence through code reviews and documentation
• Partner with application teams, security and compliance teams, and platform engineering teams to understand requirements, pain points, and deliver impactful solutions
• Present work at team demos and showcase events while contributing to team documentation, runbooks, and best practices

Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• Strong development experience in Python with demonstrated ability to write high-quality code
• AI-assisted development experience: Hands-on experience using AI coding assistants such as Cline, Roo Code, Kiro, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar tools for software development
• Full-stack development exposure with JavaScript/TypeScript and modern front-end frameworks (React preferred, Vue, or Angular)
• Multi-language exposure: Familiarity with at least 2-3 programming languages from Java, Python, Node.js, or .NET
• Solid understanding of software engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, testing, and design patterns
• Experience with or strong interest in observability concepts: logs, metrics, traces, and distributed systems
• Experience with database design and SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
• Experience with AWS Cloud services (CloudWatch, Lambda, EKS, EC2, Fargate, SQS, SNS) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with ability to explore solutions independently before escalating
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities with mindset to seek feedback early and often

Pay

This is a part-time, work-study-based opportunity designed for active graduate students. You must be able to commit to 20/hr per week for a duration of 6 months.