Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations. Built on open source and open standards, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI. Customers include Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries.

We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack. 2026 is an inflection point for Tempo, shifting from foundational work to product and operational excellence, evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products.

• Set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team.
• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements.
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team.
• Design APIs for humans and agents, shaping the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces.
• Drive operational excellence, owning outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and pushing the team toward Zero Ops.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams, mentor engineers, and participate in on-call.
• Contribute to open source, engaging the community and reviewing external contributions.

• Technical leadership: track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep systems experience: substantial hands-on 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 other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
• Operational mindset: owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, treated SLOs as a product feature.
• Customer focus and pragmatism: break complex problems into short feedback loops.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically.
• Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats.
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale 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.

In the United Kingdom, the base compensation range for this role is GBP 103,958 - GBP 124,750. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here. Compensation ranges are country specific.

Grafana Labs is a remote-only company with a global culture, transparent communication, and open source roots. We offer 30 days of annual leave per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.

Apply via the provided link.