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. In 2026, we are 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 (App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants).

• 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 (structured, deterministic, discoverable).
• Drive operational excellence, owning outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and pushing the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams, working closely with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and writing.
• Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and be a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident learning.
• Contribute to open source, engaging the community, reviewing external contributions, and helping steer the project in the open.

• Technical leadership: a track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations.
• Deep systems experience: substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar.
• Strong software craftsmanship: you write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain.
• Strong Go, or a path to it. We write Tempo in Go. Deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
• Operational mindset: you’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature.
• Customer focus and pragmatism: you break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration: you lead through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, not hierarchy.

• 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 for analytical workloads.
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses.
• 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 Spain, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 94,025 - EUR 112,830. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding
• Balance is Key: global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law.