Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, built on open source, open standards, and open culture. Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform used by more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries.

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Pyroscope team, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles. Pyroscope gives engineers code-level visibility into CPU and memory usage down to the specific line of code, and connects that signal with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack. In 2026, the focus is on reducing friction across the full experience: better onboarding, deeper integration with Grafana, and profiles that work for operational and SRE workflows.

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Wear the product hat—no dedicated PM, so engineers join customer calls, translate pain points into deliverables, and shape the roadmap.
• Drive operational excellence against SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter.
• Partner across Grafana with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and other Databases squads.
• Support teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup.
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build.
• Contribute to open source—Pyroscope is OSS, engage the community, review external contributions.

• Solid experience with a systems language—we write Pyroscope in Go; experience with Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, etc.
• Distributed systems in production—built and operated cloud services, multi-tenant data systems.
• Product sense—comfortable talking to customers, sitting with ambiguity, breaking fuzzy problems into deliverables.
• Curiosity and courage—ask hard questions and challenge the status quo.
• Strong software craftsmanship—clean, robust, performant software.
• Operational mindset—carried a pager, done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code.
• Pragmatism—break complex problems into short feedback loops.
• Clear communication—work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

• Experience with profiling and performance engineering: flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

In Ireland, the compensation range for this role is €104,000 - €124,800. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). We offer a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days. We are a 100% remote company with a global culture.

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local law.