Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

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

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join the Tempo team, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. This role will set technical direction on the hardest problems in the roadmap, including trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, query performance, and AI-friendly interfaces.

• 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 with SLOs and automation.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams.
• Mentor engineers and raise the engineering bar.
• Participate in on-call and contribute to open source.

• Technical leadership with a track record of leading complex initiatives.
• Deep systems experience building and operating distributed data systems.
• Strong software craftsmanship.
• Strong Go, or a path to it (Rust, C, C++ translate well).
• Operational mindset with production service ownership.
• Customer focus and pragmatism.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration.

Bonus points for experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, query languages, columnar storage formats, Kubernetes, AI/LLM consumers, open source, and remote teams.

In Sweden, the base compensation range is SEK 878,578 - SEK 1,054,294. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits.