Senior Backend Engineer

We build Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles. Pyroscope gives engineers code-level visibility into how their applications use CPU and memory, down to the specific line of code, and connects that signal with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack. 2026 is an inflection point for Pyroscope: we completed the rollout of our V2 architecture, cutting production costs by 92% while significantly improving scalability, and grew the number of customers using the product by 64% last year. The product is moving beyond profiling-savvy users, and our focus is shifting from standalone feature development to reducing friction across the full experience: better onboarding, deeper integration with the rest of Grafana, and profiles that work for operational and SRE workflows, not just performance specialists.

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, e.g. Read path efficiency improvement, or trace-to-profile correlation, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Wear the product hat. We have no dedicated PM: engineers on this team join customer calls, translate pain points into manageable deliverables, and directly shape the roadmap.
• Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter every quarter.
• Partner across Grafana. Work closely with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and the other Databases squads to make profiles useful wherever engineers work.
• Support your teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup.
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build, and treat incident response and post-incident learning as part of the craft.
• Contribute to open source. Pyroscope is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.

• Solid experience with a systems language. We write Pyroscope in Go; experience with one or more programming languages (e.g. Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, etc).
• Distributed systems in production. You have built and operated cloud services and understand what it takes to keep a multi-tenant data system fast, reliable, and affordable.
• Product sense. You are comfortable talking to customers, sitting with ambiguity, and breaking fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables.
• Curiosity and courage. Pyroscope is nearing feature completeness while still refining product-market fit.
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize versus when to ship.
• Operational mindset. You have carried a pager, done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code, and treat reliability as a feature.
• Pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate.
• Clear communication. You work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment and lead through writing, reviews, and shipped code.

• Experience with profiling and performance engineering: flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tooling.
• 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, and comfort engaging a community in the open.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar in a previous role (or on a homelab).
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Pyroscope is relied upon by prominent global organizations to optimize critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.

In Germany, the compensation range for this role is €97,034 - €116,441. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally. *Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.