APM Agent Developer at Nathan Claire Africa

Job Description

• This is a remote position.
• The developer will be responsible for building a lightweight, self-healing, auto-scaling, multi-platform APM (Application Performance Monitoring) agent that can:

Instrumentation & Data Collection:

• Automatically instrument applications to collect transaction traces, logs, and performance metrics.
• Capture distributed tracing across microservices.
• Track response times, error rates, resource usage, and database query performance.
• Collect and forward application, system, and security logs.

Performance & Efficiency Optimization:

• Implement adaptive sampling to reduce overhead.
• Ensure async & non-blocking data collection.
• Optimize CPU, memory, and network utilization to minimize application impact.

Distributed Tracing & Database Monitoring:

• Assign and propagate trace IDs across microservices.
• Monitor slow queries and database calls with minimal overhead.

Log Collection & Security Monitoring:

• Collect, filter, and forward application/system logs.
• Detect security anomalies and unusual resource usage patterns.

Communication & Data Transmission:

• Efficiently batch and compress data before sending to the APM platform.
• Use lightweight protocols (gRPC, Protobuf, etc.) for communication.

Self-Healing & Auto-Scaling Mechanisms:

• Implement triggers for auto-scaling based on CPU, memory, and latency thresholds.
• Enable self-healing by restarting services upon failure or excessive resource usage.

Delivery Timeline & Reporting:

• Develop the agent within 2 to 3 weeks.
• Provide technical documentation and performance benchmarks.

Requirements

Qualifications:

• Programming Expertise: Proficiency in languages commonly used for APM agents such as Java, Python, Go, .NET, or C++.
• Instrumentation & Monitoring Experience: Hands-on experience with code profiling, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and application instrumentation.
• Performance Optimization: Knowledge of efficient data collection strategies, async programming, and low-latency data transmission.
• Logging & Security: Experience integrating with logging pipelines (ELK, Splunk, Loki) and implementing basic security anomaly detection.
• Scalability & Resilience: Familiarity with auto-scaling, self-healing mechanisms, and cloud-native architectures.
• APM & Observability Tools: Experience with tools like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic, or Dynatrace is a plus.
• Networking & Communication Protocols: Proficiency in gRPC, Protobuf, or HTTP-based telemetry data transfer.
• Agile Development & Fast-Paced Execution: Ability to deliver a functional prototype within 2-3 weeks and iterate based on feedback.
• Strong Debugging & Problem-Solving Skills: Ability to analyze performance bottlenecks and optimize agent behavior.