Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, Grafana Cloud. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET).

As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap. You will lead multi-quarter technical initiatives, own the architecture of core Tempo components (ingestion, storage, query, metrics generation), drive design reviews, design APIs for humans and agents, drive operational excellence against SLOs, partner with Product and sibling teams, mentor engineers, participate in on-call, and contribute to open source.

We are looking for someone with technical leadership, deep systems experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, strong software craftsmanship, strong Go (or a path to it, with deep experience in Rust, C, C++), an operational mindset, customer focus, and leadership through writing and collaboration.

Bonus points for experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, query languages, columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet), multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes, building for AI/LLM consumers, open-source contribution, and remote work.

This is a remote opportunity, and we are interested in applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland or Germany.

Compensation: In Spain, the base compensation range is EUR 94,025 - EUR 112,830. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

We are an equal opportunity employer.