Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, offering Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform. They are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries.

Staff Software Engineer for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. The role involves setting technical direction, leading multi-quarter initiatives, owning architecture of core components, designing APIs, driving operational excellence, partnering with product teams, mentoring engineers, participating in on-call, and contributing to open source.

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout.
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Drive design reviews and make trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Design APIs for humans and agents.
• Drive operational excellence against SLOs.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams.
• Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar.
• Participate in on-call and incident response.
• Contribute to open source.

• Technical leadership: track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep systems experience: building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, performant software.
• Strong Go, or a path to it (deep experience in Rust, C, C++ translates well).
• Operational mindset: owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil.
• Customer focus and pragmatism.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration.

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs.
• Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet).
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Base compensation range for UK: GBP 103,958 - GBP 124,750. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits. Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.

Apply via the provided link.