Read maybe not, but I was there if you are curious about anything.
I was there during the transition period. Originally joined to work on the Meteor hosting platform that was called Galaxy. Handled integration of Meteor APM (which was an acquisition) both of which got sold off when the old Meteor business was sold.
I then worked on what was called Apollo Optics, the GraphQL APM product. Rewrote the time series backend to port it to Apache Druid (which remains in use today!). Was somewhat unceremoniously let go of during a bad personal period. Don't think I would have stayed anyway though, main reason I stayed as long as I did was I had a really good mentor there that taught me a lot.
Worth mentioning the company had already raised an absolute crap ton when on the original Meteor path, then the following pivot raised even more money. No idea how many rounds of financing the company has been through at this point but to say it exemplified the excesses of cheap money would be an understatement.
Developer tools is a tough business, no-one really wants to pay for that stuff at the low end which means catering to enterprise. Long sales cycles, annoying requirements etc.
I'm not sad about it, turned out really well for me.
I believe the compelling part of the current offering is the schema management features. We started building these when I was there. I don't know to what degree the alerting part of the APM product survived. It was originally requested by an enterprise customer and I re-implemented it on-top of Druid to make it much more scalable. My assumption is that should be a bit of a draw. etc.
Nice. Relatedly, as someone who has a few years of experience, how does one become a principal engineer? Anything I should know or do to get to that level?
I think most important aspect is experience, the second most important would be leadership. There is little point being a principal engineer if the intuition and experience you can bring to bear aren't embraced by your team so the soft skills definitely count. The role generally encompasses tasks that go beyond writing code, architecture being the most crucial (and technical) but you will also be expected to take part in hiring, making strategical and tactical decisions, etc.
Generally you get there through a senior or staff engineering role where you can demonstrate the technical and leadership aspects. I would focus on mentoring your more junior engineers and taking part in force multiplying efforts, i.e tooling, processes etc.
